The DXP Catalyst Update - May 9, 2025

INTRO
Welcome to This Week’s DXP Catalyst Update

It’s been a strong start to May. I had the opportunity to attend the CMS Experts event in NYC earlier this week, where I connected with vendors, agencies, practitioners, and other analysts across the CMS and DXP landscape. In this edition of The DXP Catalyst Update, I’m sharing a few takeaways from the two-day session, including themes that stood out across the discussions.

There were also a few noteworthy updates across the CMS vendor landscape this week, including a leadership transition at Sitecore and a significant funding announcement from Sanity.io - both covered below.

EVENTS
CMS Experts NYC - May 6-7th

The CMS Experts user group held a series of events this past week: Tuesday and Wednesday in NYC, Thursday in Toronto, and an upcoming CMS Summit next week in Frankfurt. I attended the NYC gathering, which brought together just over 20 leaders in the space.

The sessions followed a format similar to the Boston event I attended last fall, with opening presentations and lightning talks on day one, followed by additional presentations and a roundtable-style discussion on day two. Rather than recapping the event in full, as I did with the CMS Kickoff in Florida earlier this year, I’ll focus on a few takeaways below.

Opening Session and V-Shift’s Perspective

V-Shift, a digital agency and MACH Alliance member, hosted the NYC event at their Midtown Manhattan office. The opening discussion centered on content supply chain bottlenecks and vendor lock-in, with V-Shift advocating for prebuilt and prewired composable stacks as a way to accelerate time to value, especially compared to traditional monolithic suites.

Although composable solutions have traditionally required a high degree of digital maturity and dev-ops sophistication, V-Shift emphasized that recent accelerators are lowering the barrier to entry. These preconfigured solutions are making composable architectures more accessible to a broader range of organizations. They also shared a composable reference model demonstrating how modern DXP components can be integrated alongside legacy platforms as part of a phased transition strategy.

CMS Critic on MACH and the Agent Experience

Matt Garrepy of CMS Critic shared his thoughts on the emerging theme of “Agent Experience” within the CMS and DXP space. Drawing from his recent attendance at the Composable Conference (“MACH Four”), he noted several key trends:

• Greater practitioner interest in MACH architecture

• A focus on interoperability and agentic AI

• The growing demand for speed in retail and personalization use cases

• Continued emphasis on orchestration (a theme I’ve written about in a prior issue on Digital Experience Orchestration)

Lightning Talks - Contentstack

During the lightning talk segment, the Head of Partnerships at Contentstack discussed their evolution from a headless CMS to a full DXP (well, this transition is still in-progress despite what Gartner says). His perspective reinforced what I’ve been seeing - that this shift is largely market-driven, aimed at staying competitive and expanding the platform’s positioning.

Other vendors represented at the event included Kontent.ai, Kentico, Magnolia, and Core DNA.

Practitioners - WebMD and ICANN

Two practitioner-led presentations stood out:

• Sara Green (WebMD): As VP of Content Ops & AI Innovation, Sara shared an overview of WebMD Ignite, which includes the world’s largest collection of patient education content. The scale is substantial, with 30,000+ visuals, 3,000+ videos and animations, 20,000+ articles, and over 150 interactive tools such as audio-visual assistants and decision aids.

• Marc Salvatierra (ICANN): Marc, who leads Content Operations at ICANN, discussed their long-term CMS strategy and the complexity of managing 20+ years of content across platforms including Drupal and Alfresco. His team’s focus on content continuity and modernization sparked an interesting discussion on managing legacy content and digital assets in a highly-structured, policy-governed environment.

AI Agents and Ai12z architecture

Bill Rogers, CEO of Ai12z, presented on the technical architecture behind his co-pilot platform. I’ve seen Bill and his team demo the product at several recent DXP and CMS vendor events, but this was the first time I had the opportunity to dive deeper into the underlying architecture. His session offered a valuable look at how agent-based platforms are being structured for enterprise deployment.

VENDOR NEWS
Sitecore CEO Carousel

This week, Sitecore announced that Dave O’Flanagan is stepping down as CEO after just one year in the role. Previously their Chief Product Officer, O’Flanagan is being succeeded by Eric Stine, who moves from COO to CEO. This marks what I believe is Sitecore’s fourth CEO change in the past five years. Frequent leadership turnover can raise questions about long-term stability and strategic clarity. I continue to have mostly positive things to say about Sitecore’s product ecosystem, but it remains to be seen how this leadership change might influence their roadmap or go-to-market priorities.

Sanity Raises $85M

Headless CMS vendor Sanity.io announced this week that it has raised $85 million in Series C funding. Alongside the news, Sanity’s CEO introduced their “Content Operating System” concept, positioning it as a modern alternative to traditional CMS platforms. The model emphasizes structured, reusable content that can flow across systems, reflecting the broader shift away from page-centric content delivery toward flexible, API-first architectures.

Final Thoughts

The conversations this week made it clear that expectations around CMS platforms are continuing to evolve.

It was especially insightful to hear from practitioners managing large-scale, long-standing content ecosystems. From WebMD’s vast content libraries to ICANN’s decades of archived material, it was a reminder that content scale and longevity introduce unique operational demands. In both cases, sustaining effectiveness over time depends less on flashy features and more on disciplined governance, clear workflows, and aligned teams.