Real Story Group first started sounding the alarm about Sitecore -- especially its flagship Sitecore XP CMS -- in 2018, and then about every two years since then (most recently by my colleague Scott Simmons), even as the vendor continued to be lauded by analyst firms and consultancies alike.

Sitecore's investors, strategies, and leadership have changed over time, but somehow their dilemmas do not, so licensees carry growing risks.

A New Monogamy Mandate

Platform-oriented Web CMS vendors always have complicated if usually productive relationships with their implementation / consulting partners. Smaller partners and expert individuals often go all-in with a single vendor, but for larger integrators, any vendor will recognize that their platform may constitute just one of several different CMS solutions brought to bear by that services firm. It's a kind of polygamous relationship, but experienced managers on each side make it work to both parties' benefit.

Now comes news that Sitecore wants to enforce a new monogamy mandate on its implementation partners. Marry up with Sitecore and no other CMS vendor. We first got wind of this a couple weeks ago, sourced from a competing vendor and therefore fishy; since then we've received multiple confirmations from unhappy Sitecore partner firms.

Personally, I don't understand what Sitecore is doing here. But then again, I've been puzzling over the firm for nearly a decade now. To be sure I have no inside scoop on Sitecore's thinking and can't verify all the details of this policy. Yet from a distance, forcing such a mandate on partners feels a bit desperate, like tossing out parachutes to reduce the weight of perilously descending aircraft. Perhaps Sitecore's biggest partners -- who likely have the largest legacy install bases to support -- will simply ignore the mandate, and perhaps Sitecore will let them.

The Licensee Perspective

Of course the most important actor in any MarTech drama is you the enterprise stack leader. If your enterprise licenses Sitecore XP or even the newer Cloud XM platform, you should recognize that the plane is indeed descending, though at what pitch I cannot say. For a review of your options, consult Scott's recorded webinar.

Also recognize that many of the vendors gloating over Sitecore's troubles find themselves in a similar strategic bind. Optimizely comes to especially to mind. Historically a "poor man's Sitecore," Optimizely's strategy faces the same long-term strategic irrelevancy in a CMS 4.0 world --no matter how much AI lipstick Optimizely slathers on the platform and how many competing vendors drip out of Gartner's archaic leadership quadrant around them.

Your Web CMS strategy bears a re-think in the omnichannel era. Now is a good time to start plotting an exit from Sitecore's CMS offerings (though their DAM is a different story, in a different market). But then again, you should be reconsidering any heavyweight resource commitments at the web tier. If you'd like to talk through the situation at your enterprise, ping me here.