Shifts in technology transform consumers’ online behavior and habits, requiring companies to rethink how they communicate with and deliver targeted messages to customers. As more B2C interactions now take place in digital channels, customers tend to favor companies that break through the “digital clutter” by delivering relevant, consistent and personalized experiences.

With a platform that combines content management, commerce and customer analytics with sophisticated machine learning and AI, EQT portfolio company Sitecore helps companies make the most of every online interaction with every customer. Following the add-on acquisition of Stylelabs, Sitecore expands its product platform and further strengthens its digital capabilities.

Founded in 2001 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, Sitecore is a leading digital experience platform that offers natively-integrated content, commerce, customer analytics, marketing operations, and always-on personalization capabilities. The Company’s products enable companies to deliver the best possible experience to any customer or potential customer in any channel of engagement, ensuring highly-targeted messaging that enables companies to drive increased conversion. Sitecore primarily targets enterprise and mid-market companies across industry verticals, including brands such as American Express, Kimberly-Clark, and L’Oréal, which have put their trust in Sitecore’s solutions.

Since being acquired by EQT VII in 2016, Sitecore has grown to become one of the leading global players of web content management and digital experience software. The Company’s position as a leader in both markets has been repeatedly confirmed by prominent industry analysts such as Gartner® and Forrester®, as well as the trust placed in Sitecore by thousands of blue-chip customers.

Advanced personalization across the content marketing lifecycle

In November 2018, Sitecore announced the acquisition of Stylelabs, an innovative vendor of digital asset management, marketing resource management, and product information management software. Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, Stylelabs created the Marketing Content Hub®, which is an online platform that allows companies to easily create, manage, and publish marketing content across different channels. Stylelabs’ solutions allow CMOs and their teams to own the entire content lifecycle and understand the impact of specific content assets on individual customers’ behavior, empowering them to deliver even more engaging digital experiences.

Mark Frost, CEO of Sitecore, commented: “The addition of the Stylelabs Content Hub to the Sitecore Experience Cloud creates a unified platform that enable marketing departments to easily define, create, manage, and deliver highly personalized content across any digital channel, at every stage of the customer journey. We believe that this will provide our customers with a distinct advantage in the marketplace and enable them to build life-long customer relationships.”

The combination of Sitecore and Stylelabs further integrates Sitecore into the marketer’s workflow, which strengthens Sitecore’s footprint in its existing customer base and opens substantial additional growth potential for Sitecore in its attractive end-markets. Leading brands such as Microsoft and General Mills are already capturing the value of the combined solution.

The add-on of Stylelabs will immediately accelerate Sitecore’s revenue growth rate and is expected to be accretive to its margin profile in the mid-term.

Preparing Sitecore for continued growth

During the ownership period, one of EQT’s main objectives was to transform Sitecore’s offering from a perpetual license model deployed on-premise, to a cloud-based subscription model. The completion of this transformation and the launch of Sitecore’s fully-managed cloud offering will allow Sitecore to continue its strong growth by delivering state-of-the-art solutions through its digital experience platform. At the same time, this shift has allowed Sitecore to considerably enhance the share of recurring revenue from its large customer base that has seen continuous high growth.

Sitecore has also continued to strengthen its partner program and the Company added award-winning global digital agencies such as WPP and IBM iX to its more than 500 service delivery partners. In addition, Sitecore teamed up with Salesforce to integrate its experience platform solutions with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This broad set of partnerships provides a considerable benefit to Sitecore customers, who gain the ability to easily complement and expand the Sitecore platform with market-leading solutions and services that offer maximum value for their business.

Dominik Stein, Partner and Head of EQT’s TMT Sector Team, concluded “Consumers today demand smooth, more relevant and personalized interactions with businesses, which places an increasing demand on marketers to deliver seamless and engaging digital experiences. Sitecore has been a leader in the industry for a long time and the Company continues to evolve at an impressive pace. The management team around Mark Frost has done an incredible job at driving both innovation and growth which we are expecting to continue in the years to come. We are also very glad that we have been able to establish such a strong board with prominent industry representatives such as Jonas Persson, Craig Conway, and Carsten Thoma, which provides great testimony for the excitement around Sitecore as a leader in its space.”

Read more about Sitecore here.