SUGCON 2017

At Lake Solutions we have just returned from another highly successful Sitecore User Conference (SUGCON 2017).  At this year's event in Amsterdam the community brought together some of the most amazing people and projects in the world of Sitecore. With cognitive learning, artificial intelligence, IoT, virtual reality, big data modelling, robotics, the cloud and of course Sitecore all featuring, it shows just how flexible and extensible the Sitecore platform is. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cognitive services featured highly this year within many projects.  Utilising some of these services from providers such as Microsoft Azure has allowed for enhanced marketing insight and improved content curation and editing capabilities.  With services such as image recognition, sentiment analysis, facial sentiment and machine learning all being integrated with the Sirecore platform, we expect to see much more use of these services in future, augmenting the XP profile and helping to focus customer experiences.

Sitecore Helix, as predicted is making a big impact on the Sitecore community.  This new set of overall design principles and conventions for developing for Sitecore ensures that projects developed by agencies or businesses can co-exist, follow best practice and be portable for years to come.

The cloud also featured strongly with the latest Microsoft Azure deployment architectures and 1st class support for Sitecore as Azure web apps.  As architectures and infrastructures grow these new capabilities ensure consistent, scalable and resilient deployments.

Whilst many of these technical innovations provide a high quality product, we must not forget we are here to build high quality, high engagement marketing tools and campaigns.  It was good to see some great case studies in this area too, with overviews of multi-channel multi-device campaign execution and data driven marketing using big data approaches combined with data science.

Article Details

Ian Jepp
22 May 2017