Transforming Customer Experiences with Sitecore and MongoDB Enterprise

Modern customers live across multiple channels, creating data with every tweet, comment, swipe, and click. They expect deep personalization based on their interactions with a company's brand and won’t settle for anything less than instant gratification. Customer data is a company’s lifeblood. But it can’t help a company if it’s strewn across an organization, locked away in siloed systems. Designed to alleviate IT organizations’ data burden and empower marketers, Sitecore Experience Database (xDB) is a Big Marketing Data repository that collects all customer interactions, connecting them to create a comprehensive, unified view of the individual customer. Sitecore is a leader in this space and their product makes data available to marketers in real-time, for automated interactions across all channels. xDB is a critical component of Sitecore Experience Platform™ , a single platform that allows you to create, deliver, measure, and optimize experiences for your prospects and customers. xDB is powered by MongoDB, and collects and connects all of a customer’s interactions with a company's brand - including those on other customer-facing platforms such as ERP, CRM, customer service, and non-Sitecore websites, creating comprehensive, unified views of each customer. Those views are available to your marketers in real-time to help you create catered customer experiences across all your channels. Sitecore is one of our best and most strategic partners and we are proud to state the relationship is stronger than ever. Recently, Sitecore launched Sitecore® Experience Platform 8.2 , which includes new features such as advanced publishing, e-commerce enhancements, and data-at-rest encryption. Encryption is critical component of any application and as a best practice Sitecore recommends that all xDB deployments encrypt-data-at-rest. MongoDB provides a comprehensive native at-rest database encryption through the WiredTiger storage engine . There is no need to use 3rd party applications that may only encrypt files at the application, file system, or disk level. MongoDB’s WiredTiger storage engine is fully integrated and allows enterprises to safeguard their xDB deployments by encrypting and securing customer data-at-rest. MongoDB is the leading non-relational database on the market and an integral part of xDB. It is the ideal database for collecting varied interactions and connecting them to create a “single view” of your customers. Store and analyze anything Instead of using rows and columns, MongoDB stores data using a flexible document data model, allowing you to ingest, store, and analyze any customer interaction or data type. Scale without limit MongoDB enables you to handle up to hundreds of billions of visits or interactions per year. When your deployment hits the scalability limits of a single server (e.g., the CPU, memory, or storage is fully consumed), MongoDB uses a process called sharding to partition and distribute data across multiple servers. Automatic load balancing ensures that performance is consistent as your data grows. The database runs on commodity hardware so you can scale on-demand while keeping costs low. Minimize downtime MongoDB supports native data replication with automated failover in the event of an outage. High availability and data redundancy is built into each MongoDB replica set, which serves as the basis for all production deployments of the database. The database’s self-healing architecture ensures that your team will always have access to the tools they need to deliver the best customer experience. Deploy anywhere MongoDB can be deployed in your data center or in the cloud. MongoDB management tools providing monitoring, backup and operational automation are available for each type of deployment. In xDB, the collection database acts as a central repository for storing contact, device, interaction, history and automation data. An optimal collection database configuration helps organizations increase the availability, scalability, and performance of their Sitecore deployments. With MongoDB, companies can ingest, store, and analyze varied data from billions of visits with ease. MongoDB scales horizontally across commodity servers, allowing customers to cost-effectively grow their deployments to handle increasing data volumes or throughput. We offer a number of products and customized services to ensure your success with SiteCore xDB. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can help, [click here]((https://www.mongodb.com/lp/contact/consulting/mongodb-deployment-sitecore?jmp=blog) and a member of our team will be in touch with you shortly. MongoDB Enterprise Advanced is the best way to run MongoDB in your data center. It includes the advanced features and the round-the-clock, enterprise-grade support you need to take your deployment into production with the utmost confidence. Features include: Advanced Security Commercial License Management Platform Enterprise Software Integration Platform Certification On-Demand Training Enterprise-grade support, available 24 x 365 The MongoDB Deployment for Sitecore consulting engagement helps you create a well-designed plan to deploy a highly available and scalable Sitecore xDB. Our consulting engineer will collaborate with your teams to configure MongoDB’s replication and sharding features to satisfy your organization’s requirements for Sitecore xDB availability and performance. Click here to learn more About the Author - Alan Chhabra Alan is responsible for Worldwide Partners at MongoDB which include System Integrators, ISVs, and Technology Alliances. Before joining the company, Alan was responsible for WW Cloud & Data Center Automation Sales at BMC Software managing a $200M annual revenue business unit that touched over 1000 customers. Alan has also held senior sales, services, engineering & IT positions at Egenera (a cloud pioneer), Ernst & Young consulting, and the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. Alan is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his B.S. in mechanical engineering and his Masters in aerospace engineering.