This is the third post in a series on Sitecore XM Cloud and the pivot to headless decoupled delivery:

1. Sitecore XM Cloud's headless content delivery is good for Sitecore
2. Sitecore XM Cloud's headless content delivery is good for developers
3. Sitecore XM Cloud's headless content delivery is good for Sitecore partners
4. Sitecore XM Cloud's headless content delivery is good for customers

The prior post in this series talked about why a move to headless content delivery is good for developers with a more open development model. In this post we will cover why headless is good for existing (and emerging) Sitecore partners. As with development professionals, now is a great time to become a Sitecore partner with the openness of the platform. Let's dig in.

Headless Delivery is Good for Sitecore partners

Building off what was mentioned in the prior post, Sitecore partners are at the intersection of other parties involved - Sitecore, developers, and customers. Partners' developers now have more freedom to choose what language to develop experience implementations with, which can enable front-end teams to develop Sitecore solutions (vs. the traditional "back-end" .NET teams that focused on Sitecore solutions in the prior monolithic products).

Partners also now have a better opportunity to work with customers to support the hosting of websites since the site's rendering server is decoupled from the CMS (hosted as SaaS by Sitecore). While there always was an option for hosting Sitecore solutions in an Azure PaaS model, that typically meant hosting both the CMS server and one or more front-facing website CD servers to deliver customer experiences. Now that Sitecore hosts the CMS as SaaS, this will let partners focus their energy around front-facing website hosting for end users. Couple this with the technology freedom that comes with headless APIs/SDKs, and partners are now more than ever enabled to come up with many novel hosting solutions within the world of Sitecore solutions.

Here are some examples of hosting options partners can provide to customers while not worrying about the back-end CMS hosting:

• Vercel, Netlify, or Azure Static Web Apps for a static site built with Next.js via the React Next.js headless SDK
• Azure PaaS (or IaaS if you really want) for a site built with the .NET Core SDK