The Elephants Are Coming

Steve,

You raise good questions, I would be happy to share my views.

First, big “elephants” have just one target: help their customers. Whatever the need is, whatever the solutions are, we must be targeted on just one thing: helping our customer to be successful. Big elephants will not have all the expertise, all the resources needed. Like we did in the past, we’ll onboard niche players. The Lullabot, Four kitchen & others will stay key players for us. Same for other shops that have expertise.

Second, there is the contribution and community management thing. This is very exciting time. The community is one of the critical strength of Drupal. The way we can collaborate with the community is a mix of classical approach ( we’ve been sponsoring a d.o sprint, DrupalCon Paris, contribution to modules & translations) and more innovative ones. I’ve been discussing with Dries about Business User Groups and the way our customers can help the community understand what they are waiting from Drupal, and helping Drupal with the power of its business customers. I thing this is a major step in the way our Drupal community can evolve.

That is a very exciting topic, you can count on us in the future to be part of it.

Does it matter if they just take the software and ignore the community? If we want them to, how can we encourage them to allow their staff and consultants to contribute back to the community?

Engaging with the community is a sign of healthy engagement with Drupal itself. Companies that are willing to release their code are demonstrating their confidence in their own code and its usefulness to the wider community, and this will help to boost their reputation (one might argue that massive IT consultancies do not need to do this; I would argue that customers are becoming much more savvy about these issues and will want to see a clear demonstration of capability from their suppliers). As we’ve seen with the recent france.fr case, simply ‘adopting’ Drupal is not enough; companies must engage with the product and the community.

That said, some large companies may be put off the idea of releasing code for precisely that reason - they may believe that the quality and maintenance of that code will have an impact on their reputation and thus might represent a risk if that code is found to contain bugs (and most code does, at least somewhere). The ‘hacker ethic’ that exists in the open source community doesn’t always exist at enterprise level, and enterprise managers may be much less gung-ho about the idea of sharing code and exposing bugs in public than most Drupal developers are.

I’m hopeful that these barriers can be overcome, especially because whenever Drupal has moved into a new space (politics, fundraising, media, community sites, intranets, news hubs, etc.) this has led to a boom in the creation of new modules designed to address the specific concerns of that sector. The move into the enterprise space will create new demand for modules to address that sector’s specific problems, and I’m hopeful that many of these modules will be shared publicly.

At this stage of Drupal adoption, the ‘traditional’ (if these exist in our community ;-) drupal shops are asked by the elephants to partner with them and help the elephants in adopting their mindset; but I’m convinced that in a few years the elephants themselves will be leading the open source dance.

And that will give another boost to Drupal.

The previous 2 years, we saw a lot of small webshops moving to drupal.
When we give training or consult on Drupal projects for these teams, we very often feel that the choice to use Drupal was made by sales people, who didn’t want to lose clients by not offering Drupal. For them Drupal is “just another free software”.

The elephants on the contrary are making a strategic choice. And that means adopting “the whole package” including the extras you get when working in an open source world: reaching out to the community, sharing knowledge, releasing code.

Some anecdotal evidence: we are working on a proof of concept for one of the elephants. The spreadsheet they provide us to calculate budgets, has fields for all traditional costs (debugging, project management, contingency, …) and for this project they added an extra field with the label “Community 10%”.

This is very true, for more reasons than the one you mentioned. Quite a few companies have considerable amounts of red tape in place and the culture of open sharing that many Drupal folks take for granted is an unfamiliar thing for them. When Lullabot was working with Verizon to build their national intranet, it was a real issue for them. They had custom tools that needed to be built, other Drupal devs would benefit from the code, and Verizon’s team knew that they would benefit from the input of others in the community. Getting the internal rules tweaked to ensure that they were able to engage was the hurdle. It did happen, though!

Farther back, the case of Sony Music and Warner Brothers is instructive, too. Both built their music platforms on Drupal, and both use code that the other developed! It’s a strange case of collaboration on one level to enable competition on another. The key for most large companies, at least in my opinion, is to recognize that their web tools are not their primary product or business. Web tools are an artifact of them doing their business, and they can benefit by sharing them, rather than losing a competitive edge.

@Editor: for customer name, have a look at http://twitter.com/DenisLafont twitts , he has translated some french twitts explaining that one of the largest e-travel site is switching to Drupal

Augmentin Drug Interactions Insulin http://www.libertysdonkeys.com/ - purchase ambien Today it is available as a generic as well as brand name. http://www.libertysdonkeys.com/ - order ambien without prescription

Здравствуйте дорогие господа

Предоставляемое Вам сопровождение девочек проститутки москвы девочки, элитные проститутки москвы, проститутки, транссексуалы москвы относится не только к специфическому виду досуга, а предстаёт именно видом эксклюзивного досуга, поскольку разрешить такой вид услуг сможет далеко не все. Условия предоставляемых эскорт услуг формируется профессионализмом наших красоток, которые способных по реакции мужчины упредить пожелание и появиться именно в таком ампуа, в котором Вы бы хотели их представить. Если же Вы мечтаете познать всевозможные стороны досуга в Москве, мы предлагаем Вам одну из приятных релаксирующих процедур - интим в Москве проститутки москвы досуг, девушки, shemales, интим знакомства, транссексуалы, dosug, который проводиться искусными девушками.

При этом Вы лично принимаете решение, каким манером окончиться Ваш отпуск. Если Вы мечтаете расслабиться, то наши девочки обучены не только лишь поддерживать светские дискуссии, но смогут посодействовать и убрать напряжение посредством профессионального массажа. Заметим что, проститутки москвы девушки, интим досуг, элитные проститутки москвы, секс знакомства в соединении с волнительным общением с сексапильной девушкой позволит Вам получить заряд бодрости не просто душой, а и телом.

С уважением ваш друг Леонид

Thank you for the information provided here.

berita & informasi

شات الحب - شات مصري - دردشة مصرية - دردشة الحب - دردشة - شات - شات كلامنجي - كلامنجي - شات صوتي - شات حب

Anyone want to send us any hints as to who the client might be on this one?)

Post is nicely written and it contains many good things for me. I am glad to find your impressive way of writing the post. Now it become easy for me to understand and implement the concept. Thanks for sharing the post..Cell Phone Spy Software

I merely bumbled upon your post and desired to articulate that I have really relished understanding your blog articles…

cell phone spy

Drupal’s breakthrough into the enterprise market - but tourists have to be careful near elephants, writes Steve Parks…
pembe maske

sauna esofman
Editor’s note: Anyone want to send us any hints as to who the client might be on this one?)

That elephant is very massive and I hope that the passenger of that car walked away without a scratch. personalized wine labels

Wow, either that elephant is too big or the car is too small. DAMN! Grants for College

It is great to read such thoughts. I have to agree to most of the mentioned minds and those are well investment in to future developments in this area. Even if it may have different effect scenarios, positive trend should be undoubted. Christmas Gifts Gifts For Women

I notice that a lot of people should stay on topic to try and add value to the original blog post.