I made the claim earlier this week that Sitecore's move with Stream would allow them to hold a lead.
For a while, it feels like Sitecore has been trying to be disruptive, including disrupting themselves, racing to get to "where the puck is going to be" as the saying goes in hockey. This has given the room for others to try to close in on that lead that Sitecore had years ago, but the excitement around this year's announcements seemed firmly planted in an area that will speak to a lot of marketing teams right now\
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Sitecore Stream feels like a "Hold the Lead" play right now, but if they time this right and get the right adoption it could widen that lead, possibly even put some distance on those beloved Gartner and Forrester quadrants.
Was I being too optimistic? Viewing things through my Sitecore cheerleader glasses? I had an excellent question come in on one of my blogs this week that questioned whether Sitecore was really in a leadership position to "hold the lead":
In regards to "holding the lead" -- in recent years I have seen other players do more than catching up; some has been taking the lead in different areas.
Best example relevant to the Stream announcement -- is Optimizely's Opal. Opal has been available for some time already -- providing the same type of cross-DXP AI (Intelligent DXP, is how SC is now "box'ing" this) -- but Optimizely is also offering "bring you own AI" and a broader integration across the DXP...
It's still fees like the same race, so is Sitecore really holding the lead?
First of all, this is a great question and I love how it pushed me to think harder about the current positioning of these two products. I had been talking in general about the whole field, but when you start picking "versus" battles it does get trickier, especially with companies that sell multiple products that are vying for the same audience.
I haven't gotten my hands on Stream or Opal to be able to do a feature-to-feature comparison, and I know enough not to trust the marketing hype on either side. What I will say is that what I know of Opal is that it is AI integration across the toolset, primarily generative text integrations. It feels a lot more like some of the features Sitecore has launched over the last decade with tagging, text-generation, connecting in your own models (see Sitecore Cortex), but it feels like it has been made more available across all the products where Sitecore seems to have had it in specific spots in the past.
That said, I do think that announcing Stream is likely a competitive play by Sitecore to push back against other competitors that have come out already with a marketing story around AI. Sitecore has sat back for a long time trying to get their AI story where they want it, but that has allowed others to push in that direction harder. So in that sense, I think the announcement of Stream is likely a play to try to hold off any advances by others in that field so they can say "yes, we have that too, and ours is better." The story for Stream sounds great and I think will play really well with marketing teams that are looking for efficiency and not just a bolted on AI chatbot, but time will tell.
I would say that Sitecore was ahead of Optimizely in moving towards a fully composable structure across the DXP, was ahead in launching their CMS on SaaS, but behind in other areas. One look at those beloved analyst reports tells the story pretty quickly that Sitecore has fallen out of favour with how the analysts like Gartner and Forrester view the field. Optimizely has a strong offering and it aligns well with what the analysts are looking for these days.
I think that Sitecore has traditionally held the lead in the space versus some others, but has often chased after Adobe as their target with Optimizely as the one to beat back in the head-to-head competitions. In the past few years, they have completely overhauled their leadership, product offerings, architecture, and approach to the market and I think this gave others the opportunity to change the field.
In the end, I don't know if Stream is going to be the one thing that puts Optimizely, specifically, behind Sitecore as a choice, but I do think this is the type of move Sitecore has to make right now.
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