SUGCON Europe 2025 in Antwerp, Belgium first week of April was packed with energy insightful sessions, inspiring community content, and the always-welcome hallway chats and late-night bar banter that make these events unforgettable. There were plenty of important announcements from Sitecore’s keynotes and sessions. These updates carry serious weight for future work with Sitecore platforms - and they shouldn’t be overlooked.
Let's take a look at them one be one.
As per Dave O’Flanagan, the CEO of Sitecore, Sitecore Stream is a capability layer rather than a specific product. It orchestrates the life behind every AI-powered product in Sitecore and facilitates content creation, optimization, and personalization across both traditional and cloud-native setups. Its purpose is to streamline workflows through intelligent automation and suggestions, all while remaining flexible for various implementation needs. Sitecore Stream has become an important collaboration tool and even beyond. For example, they are currently experimenting with MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration that standardizes two-way communication between AI assistants and external apps, tools, and data sources. As artificial intelligence became central for Sitecore, the company was called an AI-first organization for the first time ever. Looking at the velocity of new features and changes, we believe that statement.
Besides the AI investments, Sitecore announces strategiс partnerships further ahead:
- both Vercel and Netlify provide premium hosting services for the headless application, the best in their breed
- CI Hub is industry-standard in-app connectivity software, that brings further more composable integrations and connections
- Microsoft, as an existing partner, expands with innovations and collaborations over AI and Azure services
- TransPerfect is an ultimate translation service that supports all the languages globally and has the support for Sitecore XM Cloud
Sitecore XM/XP version 10.5 is around the corner, expected to be released somewhere around Symposium 2025, and brings lots of features, among them:
- even more AI integrations (as we know Stream already supports self-hosted platforms starting from version 10.2) with deeper content interactions, extended branding support via chat and tools, etc.
- wider integration with other compostable products
- continued stability and support
Sitecore DXPs remain crucial products for Sitecore and will gain new features. Thanks to Stream, the AI adoption is within reach without the need for a cloud migration, so that existing projects can begin leveraging AI features and gaining value immediately.
In order to have Stream operable on self-hosted/PaaS platforms you must have access to the Sitecore Cloud Portal, plus a Stream subscription, that's in addition to the XM/XP license you already have. There is Sitecore.AiClient.config file that defines the connection string, and brand kit id, along with the reference path. Currently, the only capability offered for non-cloud DXPs is brand-aware content generation, where Stream suggests versions aligned with the brand’s tone and structure. Multiple variations can be created, allowing editors to choose the most appropriate one directly from the Content Editor. Here's the roadmap:
Sitecore Marketplace was the first ever announced publically as the first milestone was reached. It takes the strongest power of the Sitecore ecosystem back to track - the community with its crowdsourcing effort at a scale. Marketplace will let developers create either internal apps to circulate exclusively within their organizations or release public apps on free, freemium, or paid models, subject to pre-publishing moderation by Sitecore.
Currently, Marketplace only supports XM Cloud and is available with the Early Access Program. Developers can rely on specified "touchpoints" in the portal and Pages Builder app for the extension, whether it is a Cloud Portal App, Navigation or context panel integration, or even a field-level extension, such as a custom field. There is also an SDK that helps build marketplace apps. With further milestones, it becomes publicly available and will expand to the rest of SaaS products, such as Content Hub, Personalize, and others.
Sitecore always used to be a content-centric vendor and this time they introduced XM Cloud Content which is based on the learnings from Content Hub One and represents probably the most significant shift. This new backend will ultimately serve as the foundation for storing and delivering all content within XM Cloud, purely SaaS. Once live, this architectural evolution will make it possible to phase out the traditional "XM" layer and its underlying Docker-based services entirely.
XM Cloud Content lets us get rid of:
- the hierarchical tree-like data structure into a more flexible relation-based data organization
- all the publishing issues, with immediate publishing by changing the "published" flag
- inheritance-based model, in favor of composition, offering better flexibility for content modeling from "fragments of schema"
- legacy versioning embedded into a content item. The new Content system allows "external" versioning since once it gets published content becomes immutable
We've been shown the new system in action, from content structure modeling to consumption, and what was impressive - the immediate system responsiveness. Content consumption is rapid and works through with GraphQL, more to say the system suggests the query structure, making it even faster.
There also was announced new Content SDK for XM Cloud, but it has nothing to do with the above XM Cloud Content, so please do not be confused.
Content SDK is effectively a slim subset of JSS SDK exclusively for modern XM Cloud development, without having legacy code for rudimental features, that do not exist in XM Cloud (XP Forms, REST API content consumption, chrome editing mode, etc). In addition, the overall size and complexity was drastically reduced, namely:
- less included packages: 6 now against 14 as in JSS SDK
- less files: 65% reduction!
- less code: 54% of unused code has been removed
- faster page load: counted as 200ms
- overall size reduction by a shocking 89%
The best part is that XM Cloud Content SDK is already available along with its source code. As for the original JSS, it won't go away and will stay developed further for supporting Sitecore XM and XP implementations.
Worth mentioning large improvements to the XM Cloud Starter Kits with exciting expectations of the App Router introduction along with optimization of middleware.
Last but not least, there were significant documentation improvements. Given the overwhelming number of headless SDKs (JSS, Content, .NET Core, etc), the documentation required some order and consistency, which is now achieved (proof).
Separately worth mentioning Content Hub changes. If you occasionally monitor Sitecore's changelog (that's where the company highlights all the new features and fixes), you may have noticed that Content Hub announcements disproportionately dominate that page - there were plenty of recent additions and improvements into CLI/SDKs/APIs of Content Hub. Along with media delivery and Experience Edge enhancements, these changes are massive!
Due to its nature, Content Hub appears to be the best beneficiary of AI and Sitecore Stream introduction. It also essentially benefits from the introduction of Marketplace:
Sitecore’s Content Hub is evolving—moving from trusted integrations to flexible, composable extensibility, unlocking:
This SUGCON event has sent a clear message: Sitecore is evolving, and doing it rapidly. It hears back from the community, learns from the mistakes, both own and competitors', and leverages its own strength. The future seems to be bright and we're almost there.