Sitecore announces Experience Commerce 9, with new ASP .NET Core 2 architecture

Sitecore is rolling out Experience Commerce 9, a release that introduces a new commerce engine built using Microsoft's ASP .NET Core 2 technology and tools to accelerate uptake by partners and customers.

The latest version of Sitecore's commerce platform, which the company announced today at NRF 2018, replaces the older Commerce Server technology that the company acquired from Microsoft several years back. Version 9 "[blends] content, commerce, and contextual intelligence as well as [introduces] easier-to-use, faster business tools unified in one view," according to the company's announcement of the release.The new architecture is built for quicker deployment in various cloud architecture models, as well as for on-premises.

About three years in the making, Commerce 9 is developed to work in a modern IT landscape, meaning it is meant to be deployed in cloud environments - primarily Azure but also Rackspace - as well as on-premises. It has a plugin-based architecture says Sitecore director of product management Wayne Smith, senior director for the Commerce product, that should improve the partner configuration and customization experience to more easily suit the needs of end users.

"[Experience Commerce 9] has the ability to scale to new circumstances," Smith said in an interview. "Commerce isn't one size fits all. Some organizations have massive catalogs, but may only place 100 orders a day. Others have a small range of things but process tens of thousands per day. So ability to scale up in various places is important."

Smith added that the updated architecture should make it easier for partners to adopt and deploy Enterprise Commerce 9. Sitecore expects that the new release will broaden the appeal of Enterprise Commerce, and also win over more Sitecoreamong partners who already sell it and those that hadn't yet adopted it.

"We started to talk about ...