Sitecore appoints Boxever's Dave O'Flanagan as Chief Product Officer

March 16th, 2021. Sitecore, a member of our ecommerce platform shortlist, has appointed Dave O'Flanagan from its recent acquisition of CDP platform company Boxever to the new role of Chief Product Officer.

O'Flanagan, an Irish national with a MSc in Computer Science from Trinity College, Dublin, founded Boxever in 2011 following a role leading R&D at an ecommerce company focused on the airline industry. The Boxever product suite shows strong signs of this airline history, with documentation describing the intricacies of "open-jaw" tickets (a return ticket where the destination and/or origin are not the same in both directions) and "traveler" being an optional class of guest defined in its identity data model.

Sitecore's acquisition of Boxever follows fellow CMS company Episerver's recent acquisition of optimization and experimentation company Optimizely. Personalized digital experiences are all important to these companies' futures.

Sitecore's acquisition appears to be the stronger of the two from a product standpoint. Boxever's CDP approach to building personalized experiences provides a key software component of the overall architecture.

Episerver's acquisition gives it the optimization, personalization and experimentation features that Boxever has, but without the fundamental underlying CDP components of the customer data model and identity resolution.