July 13, 2016
By Sam Del Rowe, contributing writer

Sitecore and Microsoft Announce Expanded Partnership

Experience management software company Sitecore today announced an expansion of its partnership with Microsoft, extending Sitecore's cloud offerings for Microsoft Azure. The expanded partnership will provide users with improved capabilities through Azure's cloud platform, including features aimed at delivering relevant, personalized engagements to customers.

Sitecore offers a number of tools to help build these engagements. First, the solution collects and connects customer data from various sources and uses that data to build a single view of the customer that can be used for personalization, segmentation, and analysis. Second, Sitecore allows all content changes to be automatically A/B tested, while its analytics capabilities automatically search for additional optimizations. Finally, the solution connects content and commerce through an add-on that draws upon customer profiles to personalize offers and can integrate with existing commerce software.

Sitecore is a Microsoft Gold Independent Software Vendor partner and has been a provider of offerings for Azure since 2010. According to a statement by Jean-Paul Gomes, corporate vice president and head of the Microsoft Alliance, Sitecore, the expanded partnership will allow Sitecore to optimize its solutions for Azure, delivering improvements particularly in speed and scale. More specifically, Sitecore will develop platform-as-a-service optimizations specifically for Azure, and adopt Azure Resource Manager and Azure Marketplace as its primary resource management and provisioning solutions.

Together, Sitecore and Azure currently offer a number of services. An integrated user interface allows users to manage cloud delivery infrastructure and simplify website deployment to the Azure cloud. Additionally, Sitecore Azure is built around Azure's cloud services and allows for automatic deployment of web servers and SQL databases. Web servers can also be deployed from an on-premises content editing server to any number of Sitecore Azure cloud services hosted at Azure locations globally. Sitecore Azure also works to reduce redundancy between geographies, reduce costs and time required to deploy a solution to a new server, and reduce cost and time required to adjust server capacity.

Michael Seifert, CEO of Sitecore, noted the two companies' ongoing alliance in a statement:

"Microsoft is a long-term strategic collaborator with Sitecore as we jointly serve several hundred customers worldwide. This expanded partnership will help us speed the delivery of our cloud computing services to market, building on our leadership in web content management and the Sitecore Experience Platform."

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft Corp, echoed the sentiment in his statement:

"Microsoft is proud to expand our alliance with Sitecore in an effort to bring more compelling digital experiences to our joint customers. By combining the power, scale, and rich platform service offerings of Azure with Sitecore's customers, together we will drive digital transformation for our customers and help them achieve more."