Coveo’s vision of the best information – everywhere, every time, for everyone – takes a committed ecosystem to deliver, particularly as demand grows for transformational digital experiences. That demand is especially strong in the world of digital CX. Delivering the best information to every website visitor, on every device, every time – and often without them looking for it – takes a village, and that village is growing! Recent Coveo strategic partners include Microsoft and Avanade, and recent Sitecore implementation partners include EPAM, Rightpoint and Kagool. Since we’re all gathered here at Sitecore Symposium 2016 in New Orleans, we thought it would be a perfect opportunity to get to know our new partners better, and to help our community get to know them, too.

At the strategic partner level, Avanade is Sitecore’s first Platinum Implementation Partner and the leading digital innovator on the Microsoft platform. Coveo Intelligent Search apps for Sitecore are now included in Avanade’s cloud-based Digital Marketing Managed Service, built on the Sitecore Experience Platform. This enables Sitecore customers to deliver the most relevant, contextual digital customer experiences. According Florin Rotar, Avanade digital platforms and offerings lead, “Coveo’s Intelligent Search platform and applications make our digital offerings even smarter, and will allow our clients to rapidly transform and enable relevant touch-points with customers by injecting additional intelligence into every encounter.” With 29,000 digitally connected people across 23 countries, Avanade focuses on bringing clients the best thinking through a collaborative culture that honors diversity and reflects the communities in which it operates. Stop in to see Avanade in the Partner Pavilion, and learn more during these sessions:

  • Riddle me this! What’s the real business impact from Customer Experience? 9/15 3:30 PM Celestin D
  • Not Just a Cool Party Trick: Sitecore Federated Experience Manager 9/16 2:30 PM Celestin G
  • Build the Perfect Omni-channel Experience from Sitecore Commerce 9/16 1:30 PM Celestin H
  • Getting Started: Mobile Experiences that Inspire 9/16 1:30pm Strand 13

Coveo for Sitecore Implementation Partners: A Platinum Ecosystem

EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE:EPAM), a leading global provider of product development and software engineering solutions, is one of Sitecore’s 16 North American Platinum Implementation Partners, and a Platinum Sponsor of Symposium. Listed 24th on the 2016 IDC Financial Insights FinTech Rankings Top 25 Enterprise Partners, EPAM has 18,000 people serving customers in over 25 countries.

We caught up with Dean Thrasher, EPAM Senior Solution Architect, to talk about the new partnership with Coveo. According to Dean, the partnership means both better, and less expensive digital transformation for EPAM customers: “To date, we’ve had to custom build search functionality for our clients through our digital engagement practice. Now with Coveo’s excellence in incorporating machine learning and behavioral analytics in addition to text search, we look forward to offering advanced search features to our customers out of the box. Coveo’s capabilities can help our clients save time and money. Instead of businesses needing several developers with coding skills to manually manipulate the search function and relevant rankings, business users and content editors can make these tuning adjustments, allowing our customers the potential to be more nimble and responsive.

Dean spoke about the shift to search-driven CX, top of mind for each partner: “In the past five years, we’ve seen a big shift in user behavior on websites. Previously, designers and engineers would focus on navigation, because it’s what the users wanted. Now, users immediately start with the search box. The quality of the search experience is a critical factor in how users judge a brand. If you have poor search results, you immediately lose those users. Search used to simply be a magnifying glass icon on the homepage of a website. Now, search is used everywhere throughout modern web applications – providing recommendations or showcasing related items. It’s absolutely crucial for our clients to think strategically about their search capabilities if they want to digitally transform in the market.”

Visit EPAM in the Partner Pavilion and hear their take on machine learning in this session:

  • Machine Learning in Overdrive: Get Ready for the Cognitive Shift, Developer Breakout Track, 9/15, 10:45 AM, Celestin E

Also both a Platinum Implementation Partner and a Platinum sponsor of Sitecore Symposium 2016, Rightpoint is a leading customer experience agency with technology at its core. We spoke with Nick Laidlaw, Senior Vice President, Digital Marketing and Mark Ursino, Director, CMS National Practice Lead. According to Nick, one of the key benefits of the Coveo partnership lies in the area of personalization. “Consumers and our customers expect personalized interactions. Rightpoint guides our customers through personalization planning with our Digital Strategy team and execution from our technology team. Coveo can help deliver relevant search results based on implicit site activity,” he said, noting that “This is an attractive feature that customers are just learning about and are extremely interested in it.”

Mark, who leads delivery in the customer experience practice, added that Coveo helps empower marketers: “Getting things in the hands of marketers is huge, there is certainly a balance between IT- and marketing-driven projects. Organizations are trying to put more control in the hands of marketers, and Coveo helps them do that really well.

“At Rightpoint we are actively trying to educate our customers and prospects about the value of relevant search results and intuitive search interfaces,” said Mark. “With Coveo, we can quickly demonstrate the “art of the possible.”

Healthcare marketers and IT teams can hear more about Rightpoint during this session:

  • Own the Digital Healthcare Experience panel, 9/15 3:30 PM, Celestin C

Visit Rightpoint at Booth 508.

In the UK, there are only a few Sitecore Platinum Implementation Partners, and Kagool is the busiest, with more than 160 Sitecore projects under its belt. In fact, Kagool works exclusively on the Sitecore Experience Platform, and says, “we live and breathe ‘Sitecore Digital.’” The Kagool team recently worked together with Coveo and Sitecore on Formica Group Europe, a leading provider of branded, design coordinated surfacing solutions for commercial and residential customers, as the company migrates its site to Sitecore 8.2. Ben Morgan, Kagool’s business development director and board member, and Martin Davis, Sitecore developer and MVP, said that during the process of working with Coveo on Formica, they found the cultural fit to be an added bonus and very important to Kagool. “Culture plays a really important part at Kagool,” said Ben, “we were impressed with Coveo as a partner, the way that people approach business, that’s as important to us as the product.”

Kagool has seen a great deal of growth recently and Ben noted that “every deal today is global.” Key to working with enterprise customers, he said, is having the support of leading partners such as Sitecore and Coveo. “Working with Coveo gives us a level of comfort that they’re the expert, they know where they’re going with Intelligent Search. The businesses we work with understand the importance of search and are happy to work with Coveo as a leader, certainly the recognition from the Gartner and Forrester reports is an important factor. Plus, the other search offerings, lucene and Solr, simply won’t work for enterprise customers.”

Both Ben and Martin brought up the pervasive theme of search-driven CX – that search is used throughout the site to surface relevance content, providing a more dynamic and personalized experience for site visitors. “Today, we’re not building pages or tracking trends, with Coveo the content we show visitors is gradually personalized to who we think they are. The site content is driven by search – it’s becoming a search-powered experience.”

At Symposium, we’re also connecting with old friends, such as Fishtank Consulting. Fishtank President and Sitecore 9-time MVP Dan Cruickshank will join Coveo CMO Mark Floisand and Coveo customer Brice Dunwoodie, President and CEO of Simpler Media Group, parent company of CMSWire, during the session:

  • Personalizing CX with Self-Learning Intelligent Search, 9/15 2:00 PM, Celestin D – Learn more about the session in a video here.

Developers can catch up on how to further enhance Sitecore personalization with machine learning during this session:

  • Coveo Machine-Learning: The power and possibilities of self-learning search 9/16 2:30 PM, Celestin H

Stay tuned for more about each of our new Sitecore Implementation Partners, in a series of blog posts to be published over the next few weeks. And stop by Coveo’s booth at #201, join our partners’ and our sessions, and get some Coveo swag as well as a chance to win a GoPro. Looking forward to seeing you!