If you’re an enterprise marketing or technology leader, you’ve likely felt the need to modernise, driven in part by colleagues but most certainly customers. How you manage customer experiences (and the way you deliver those experiences into production) is critical.
That makes the shift to Sitecore XM Cloud not just some future ambition, it creates impetus now because older tech is making the struggle to keep pace with today’s business needs evident. From content updates that take longer than they should, to upgrades that gobble up budgets and progress just plain stalling under the weight of outdated architecture.
By 2026, it is expected that 70% of organisations will have mandates to adopt composable DXP to break free from monolithic technology. This is up from the 50% of organisations that Gartner research defined in 2023. That makes the message pretty clear, the future of digital experiences is composable, SaaS-based and cloud-native. With Sitecore, that future is already here and recent projects illustrate the validity of their approach across CMS, eCommerce, DAM, CDP and Search.
We’ve recently launched websites for Dairy Australia, as they recognised the need to modernise their digital ecosystem to streamline content management across multiple websites and leverage a more scalable future-proofed solution.
Utilising SItecore XM Cloud and Content Hub, Dairy Australia have not only been able to modernise, but deliver a much more comprehensive experience to their customers whilst leveraging the authoring experience of Sitecore XM Cloud.
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Apart from the Gartner research and the desire to be out with the old and in with the new, there are some tangible impacts from every financial quarter you delay moving to a modern platform. It’s suggested that somewhere between 60%–70% of IT budgets go into maintaining legacy systems rather than into innovation, no business can afford that kind of drag for too long without creating a compounding set of challenges for internal teams and customers alike.
So, boards and executive teams are starting to ask the hard questions and they want to know :
These are fair questions and they come from a couple of places. The first is from a position of understanding that previous investments haven’t had decent answers for those questions above (and whether that’s the strategy or technology to blame). And secondly, it comes from a place of urgency, when your competitors are embracing cloud agility and composable architecture, standing still with legacy systems means falling behind.
Forrester analysts predict that even the laggards are finally jumping to SaaS, expecting that by the end of 2025, 75% of new enterprise software purchases will be SaaS (with only 25% clinging to on-premise solutions). In other words, the era of big on-prem, do-everything-in-one-place suites is ending, replaced with lean, scalable, SaaS-based digital experience platforms. Change is no longer optional, it is imperative.
Sitecore’s XM Cloud is designed to answer that first big question from the board which is essentially “if we invest in this, will it be worth it?” and in the current climate, that question has been more pressing than ever. With Sitecore XM Cloud, many of the hidden costs of legacy platforms simply evaporate. No more costly infrastructure to maintain - hosting and scaling are handled for you. No more painful version upgrades every other year - you’re always on the latest version by default. That means your team spends more time creating value (like building better customer experiences) and way less time on repetitive maintenance or firefighting old code. It directly attacks the “80/20” problem where 80% of the budget went to maintenance but XM Cloud flips that, so your spend actually drives new growth along with customer experiences and value.
From a pure ROI standpoint, a modern DXP like Sitecore XM Cloud can have tangible business benefits, including :
We’ve found that businesses using Sitecore XM Cloud achieved an average 20% boost in conversion rates after optimising their digital experiences after launch. Higher conversion and engagement translates to stronger customer experience and / or real revenue, something any CFO or board is keen to achieve.
Additionally as XM Cloud is a part of Sitecore’s composable suite, it plays nicely with other SaaS services (Content Hub, OrderCloud, Search, Personalise, CDP etc). You can start small and expand or consolidate fragmented tools into one cohesive digital experience platform over time. The result is not just cost savings, but also better customer experiences that drive revenue and loyalty - after all, what’s the point of any digital platform if not to attract and retain customers?
Sitecore XM Cloud addresses the ROI and capability concerns, importantly, Recursion addresses the “How do we get there fast - without breaking everything?” concern. Recursion, designed by the team at Switch, is an accelerator for moving to Sitecore XM Cloud quickly and reliably.
Think of Recursion as a smart accelerator, instead of starting your Sitecore SaaS migration from a blank slate, Recursion brings a composable foundation of pre-built architecture, reusable components, features and integrations, along with proven methodologies to jumpstart the process. The approach is governed and modular from day one to deliver on a new platform that keeps up with the speed of modern marketing.
Perhaps the best way to explain Recursion’s impact is through a real example. Dairy Australia, the national dairy industry body, was grappling with fragmented content systems and an existing platform that made updates slower than they would have liked. They knew they needed a chance to deliver better digital experiences to farmers, consumers and the community. By partnering with Switch, Dairy Australia launched a fully modern Sitecore XM Cloud solution (with Content Hub for managing assets) using Recursion as the accelerator.
The result? A composable, scalable digital platform that went live in record time - without the usual replatforming chaos. Internal teams were able to work in parallel with the Switch team. The new Dairy Australia websites are modular and easy to evolve, but also governed for consistency, so both marketing and IT are happy.
In short, Recursion delivered speed without compromise, giving Dairy Australia a unified customer experience and a strong foundation for future growth (all in a fraction of the time a traditional rebuild would have taken).
The magic of Recursion comes from its “smart reuse” philosophy. As Switch’s CEO Steve Nelson puts it, Recursion gives customers a smarter, faster, more confident path to XM Cloud without compromising quality. It’s been used not just for XM Cloud migrations, but also to accelerate projects on Sitecore OrderCloud and Content Hub - proving the approach across different composable pieces.
All the building blocks in Recursion are continually refined on modern architecture, so you’re never stuck with stale tech. This means many Recursion-driven projects go live in weeks, not months - rapidly proving their value to the business. For digital leaders, that speed to value is a game-changer, it de-risks the migration because you’re using something that’s already known to work and it shortens the timeline where things can go wrong. When you can show results in a matter of weeks, it builds confidence at every level.
When it’s time to justify the move to Sitecore XM Cloud (and using Recursion to get there) you need to speak in the language of business outcomes. Here are four headline benefits to highlight - the kind of points that board members and executives will care about:
In short, you’re aligning with where the industry is headed, ensuring that your digital platform can adapt to whatever the future brings. Digital leaders don’t need to wait for some “perfect moment” to migrate. In reality, waiting is the riskiest move of all, it just means more budget drained by legacy inefficiencies and more opportunities missed while competitors forge ahead. The good news is that you can make the move with confidence and pretty quickly with Sitecore XM Cloud providing the modern foundation and immediate ROI gains and Recursion providing the safe, accelerated pathway to get there without the usual replatforming pain.
It’s not about a big bang upheaval, it’s about a smart, phased transition that starts delivering value from day one.
If a modern DXP is on your roadmap, then the combination of Sitecore XM Cloud + Recursion is your fast lane to success. It transforms “we know we need to modernise” from a daunting ambition into an executable plan. So instead of asking “when should we migrate?”, the question becomes “why not now?”. With the right platform and the right accelerator in place, you can turn ambition into action - faster, smarter and with far less risk. The result is a digital experience platform that’s finally ready for what’s next, helping your business grow and adapt in a digital-first, cloud-first world. And that’s something every board will applaud.
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