 So we've got plenty of questions, so we have no problem running through all these. These guys have promised to answer every single question as long as it takes. So we'll be here all day. So we're going to go for a little while, and then I could ask Xena, maybe, or somebody to just kind of give me a time check. We'll get through the stack, we'll go as far through as we can, and yeah, we'll see where we go from here. So thanks for all your input. Okay, so first question, and I'd like to address everybody here. Actually, you know what, sorry, let me do some introductions first. Apologize, let me do introductions. First, I have Olivia March. I'm just going to let you do your own introduction. How's that? I work at the ACCC, so the Australian Competition Consumer Commission in the energy regulation sector. We have six Drupal websites, and I've just been involved in the development of the most recent one, and previous government and education experience. And I'm Vesa Palmo. I'm the CEO of Wunderkraut. Wunderkraut was formed last summer by merging some European Drupal shops, namely Crimson, Meara and Node1, including some private individuals. So we are today 150 people focusing only on Drupal in nine European countries. So it's rather distributed organization for now. I'm Felipe Rubin, chief architect with CINT, which is a Brazilian company. We have about 1,600 people, but about 300 developers or talents in Drupal spread out across Brazil, China and Argentina. So doing global support and development for organizations, farm organizations from the US with global reach, pretty much. And I'm Jeff Walpole, I'm the CEO of Face2 Technology, based in Washington, D.C., and New York. So I'm the token United States representative here. Okay, so our first question. Is using open source different than proprietary for enterprises? And if yes, why? So how is open source different for enterprise organizations? I mean, from the companies I have worked before or currently working on, the challenge when it comes to using open source and compared to proprietary in terms of support, for example. That's the first thing that comes. But later on, as they start adopting open source, that really gets mitigated. So in the end of the day, it goes down to the license fees and that part related to it. And really getting to know and how to work with the community and work with something that they don't have so much control when compared to calling to a company or to a proprietary model organization. That's one of the big differences that I felt when selling Drupal or putting position in Drupal within large enterprises and they were used to that proprietary model and then they need to change the mindset and really get the benefits out of the Drupal community, which is basically, in my view, the flexibility and time to market. So that's something that was really different for those organizations. Yeah, I think the real bigger difference is if you're working with somebody with, let's say, a single vendor CMS against the big ecosystem, if it's open or closed, I think that's the largest difference with potential vendor lock and so on. That being said, with some commercial products, you might not get what you really want and sometimes it's impossible to get some new features in and these kinds of things, but I don't think if that's really all that common. I'm not there to say that there are not that many differences. The community aspect is a big difference because you can't just pay money for somebody to support it or you can't, but that's not going to be enough in all cases if you are large scale Drupal user, for example. But mostly, I don't think it's a major difference actually. I don't think you get much of a difference from the user level but I think in terms of the executive level and trying to sell it up, there's a perception that open source isn't as safe or secure but there's also a lot of noise in the open source sort of market whereas a single vendor, you know who you're talking to in open source, the message can get confused, especially at a non-technical level. Great, great. Now a very provocative question. Do you genuinely think that Drupal is amazing or is it simply the best there is? i.e. is it just the best poo in a pile of poo? I'm not making this up, this is what people write. What's that? Yes, you can tweet that. Just don't attribute it to me. What do you think? I don't think I'll use the same language. I don't know if it's the best. I do kind of look at everything in terms of the best tool for the job. It is one of the better, that's for sure but I don't think there's any perfect solution that fits everyone. Yeah, I'm not going to go with the poo one but I personally have some sort of love-hate relationship with Drupal and it lacks a lot of things but that being said it's the best solution out there currently so definitely the best option for large enterprises at least. Yeah, I agree with you guys. There's no super bullet. One important thing is about the right tool for the right job. Like you, I have the house of the hate and love thing with Drupal so I've seen cases where people chose you as Drupal and just screw up by using that for the wrong purpose so I think that's the overall plan anyways. Did you want to caveat that those are not the official thoughts from the Drupal Association in your board seat? I'll do that for you. Okay, this is a pretty simple question but it's also a very complex question and it's one that I think a lot of us get a lot which is what's the real competition for Drupal? And of course we realize that different sizes and in different places it's different so I think it's interesting mainly from a regional perspective to hear what you're seeing in the countries that you're in and I'd also be interested in terms of size. Large enterprises is it different than what you're seeing what you're seeing is sort of simple website building software? That's a really good question and we have physical offices in nine different European countries and for us each market is different if you look at the competition today I can't say there would be like one primary competitor and definitely it also comes to the scale as well somebody could say WordPress is the biggest competitor for Drupal in enterprise level that's definitely not the case today but that may be the case in a few years if you look at how WordPress is moving forward today but I would say it's mostly proprietary software solutions which are different from market to market they range from Java to Microsoft to whatever basically I think our list of primary competition has something like 20 products today and as I said different from one country to another I would be interested to hear what those are in the Australian market though Yeah me too I'm not going to risk and take some names but in my past two experiences when selling Drupal and I'm more focused on large enterprises there was just a couple of two that were standing out out there against Drupal and Drupal in the end was just the SPS case was the winner but was more Java one I think Oracle Fed was called Fedwire and also in Brazil so that case was in the US first so even in the US for a Fortune Fit pharmaceutical company they chose Drupal on top against Oracle Fedwire and also in Brazil Oracle was really big over there with the new CMS product which I forgot the name but I was a big contender with Drupal over there so that's what I've been facing more in terms of competition but still and my focus are companies more towards digital marketing so all the sites that we've been building is not specific use case like LMS or any or government but it's more like final sites or websites for consumers so that's where Drupal is really standing out even with such proprietary solutions If I can quickly add actually something Funnily enough I'm currently based in the UK and our biggest competition there is everything about Drupal because there are so few big Drupal shops so quite a few customers have been recently leaving Drupal because they've been so disappointed that they can't find proper big Drupal vendors to actually help them out and they've been leaving to Java or Ruby on Rails and to commercial solutions and to all sorts of directions so like big part of my job in UK at the moment is to sell our competition we have great competitors here and you're not going to get stuck with us if you want a big Drupal sort of funny place to be at trying to sell your competition all the time but in some of our markets that's what we absolutely have to do like every day Okay, I've got a few In government it's pretty much better than what you know often and it's often a Microsoft solution Kentico is the latest one that's been pushed a lot but then you're competing with legacy systems so people are used to SharePoint they don't refer to an intranet, they refer to SharePoint they don't know the difference so it's in terms of, they don't know the difference between CMSs or that there are more than one in Victorian government it's very much my source matrix which I hate so I guess it depends in terms of the education sector it's either Moodle or Blackboard in Australia Great, so Oh yeah, sure, in the US I'd say definitely WordPress WordPress and Joomla for open source CMS on the more sort of ubiquitous CMS side larger enterprises I would say Adobe CQ5 tends to be the thing that is cropping up the most and seems to be competing with Drupal and doing a good job at it at the top level tends to demo real well, shows real well I don't know how well it actually works I'm sure one of the fine folks from Aquia can whip up all the research on how it compares so next question I have for you guys is a little bit more of an architectural question and the beauty of sort of crowdsourcing our questions like this is you get a variety of different perspectives and what people are interested in and this one's a little bit more architectural so bear with me but the trend in enterprise solution seems to be to serve many many websites in a traditional IT systems approach and then it's a question why not produce many many individual sites as disposable IT solutions so you never have to upgrade you just rebuild you have no cross site integration issues and you keep up the pace of fast and light web so in other words using Drupal as open source without licensing fees can we build disposable websites faster and cheaper than building a monolithic platform I think you can say there's pluses and minuses migration of content is always going to be an issue so if you've got a standard format you can automate that but in my experience being government sector and education people want the information they want they don't want to hang out so the second you move a resource or you move a page even you'll get handwritten letters, emails everything I worked at the Bureau of Meteorology for a while and I think they moved where one of the forecasts for farming was and the number of complaints that were made just because they changed one level of architecture was insane so if you're creating multiple disposable sites there's not many people that want to invest the time to relearn how to use your site unless you have quite a dynamic audience so I think in terms of consistency of user experience is probably the main risk in that one I think one of the great sites of Drupal is that you can do so many things with it and I find that we do three things all the time we do massive sites that have everything in one site and multi-site profiles what not we do platform service kind of sites internally for customers where they can deploy 50 or 500 sites internally let's say a big university for example they're going to end up having hundreds if not thousands sites internally and that's more like a platform as a service kind of thinking and I find we also do quite a bit of like I don't know if they're exactly disposable you think of them as disposable but it's really difficult to get rid of the sites in the end but sometimes it is actually really good to quickly just whip up a site with the small budget and the developers tend to hate it because it's not as challenging because you can do it out of the box with Drupal fairly easily but sometimes it's really a good solution for the customers so I would say there's no single right answer to the question I agree too and I think Aliva had a point about consistency so again with the customers we've been working on they came from an area or a scenario where they had hundreds, thousands websites disperse pulverized across the organization different departments, different requirements and was a madness to maintain all of that and being able to provide the same as one department we would hear from the other department about the benefits they would have on that website and they won it at all and then sometimes different technology so we started losing control across a large enterprise so keeping consistency is really key for IT department to maintain and manage the platform yeah so I would just I would like to add as well I think that from my perspective and that my company's perspective like Vesas we've done a variety of these different platforms what I find most interesting and most fascinating and helpful about Drupal is that it's capable of doing all those things so the SPS case study earlier where you've got a large platform and you insert Drupal into a stack that includes a variety of other things is possible the disposable website concept is also possible we've done that for a publisher where they have a very strong content repository and a system of feeds and APIs and we were able to spin up hundreds of websites that you just throw away when you're done that are just you know not even really more than a standard theme some CSS changes and they just inherit content from this feed and when you're done with them you don't you don't need them anymore all the content resides in the repository so it's interesting that we can do all those things so transitioning to a few individual questions based on your experience Felipe someone wants to know what is your biggest frustration and pain point operating a software development company I guess and I think it would be more like Drupal related right or so if I can stick with that when we started with Drupal first was really the learning curve and training and getting resource and once we reached a certain level we established our own training center within the company then it was mitigated after that working with different customers I guess would be the mindset of open source working customers that were not used to and then be able to manage the whole modules which platforms would be created based on those modules for those customers and of course the developers wanted to use different modules that are out there and then be able to manage correctly with the right customer and the right modules for that I guess from Drupal perspective that's the biggest challenge for project manager from my team when dealing with the developers and be able to keep up with what the Drupal community is putting out there for us to leverage well it has and it hasn't I think it hasn't really helped us to win more business for Drupal as such because at least in European market currently there are not that many big Drupal players there are really big IT giants like Accenture and Capgemini there but when you actually have a look at how much resources they have they are relying mostly on freelancers today and they have some of their own teams but they haven't really built up the competency so our goals with all of the merger and everything we did were like to well one of the goals was to create a bigger and more credible player for big enterprises because they just don't want to work with shops that have 10 or 20 people on staff they find it's too scary to work with small players often I don't personally I don't know why but that's their policy so it has definitely helped us to win a lot of business when we compete against other Drupal vendors but that's not our primary goal our primary goal is to expand Drupal so in that yes it's been helpful but we would need to have a couple more Wunderkrauts in order to make a really big splash so if somebody wants to do one for Australia why not so I think my answer is yes and no and now for both of you a question from your panel made here what are your pet peeves when responding to tenders or in dealing with customers what can and should be done differently by the customer specifically that's always a difficult question because you get all sorts of requests for proposals half of them are complete crap to be honest half of them are okay or excellent my biggest problem with those is usually the legal department when they get involved because we do only agile projects and that's a nightmare for most legal departments so they want to know everything ahead of time and everything has to be fixed has to be fixed schedule budget scope everything and I think that's the worst thing for us so if I would have to just name one thing it would be the design first kind of thinking that especially many of the large enterprises are still into and public organizations often as well luckily that's changing slowly but today it is the primary problem I have on my side something I guess similar will be work with the customer in partnership so when it comes to RFPs we will be discussing later about the new RFP that comes out and then you get the whole team set up for that and then the customer just cancel that and you have all the team ready to start a Drupal excellent team and you just have to think about what to do with that development and even when you have an agreement with the customer for six months or a year the chains will come and there's sometimes not so much partnership in terms of working with your vendor and making the best usage of that team to help your business I guess that's as a system integrator that's one of the biggest pains and that goes across the large organizations different departments they just wouldn't worry about only about what their business are not so much about what they can deliver I don't have an answer for that it's really we try we also use Agile so we try to we show them by using a dedicated team for a long time it's better for them to get to know your business so not only the Drupal learning curve but learning the business so trying to get a long-term commitment that's only beneficial for them and that's where Agile really gets into place with this ground methodology that we use 100% as well and when we're able to show to some of the customers they really get into that and then we have a partnership for a few years but there's still some businesses some large enterprise that have a hard time getting into that model so that's where we struggle our project managers business directly struggle to convince to get on board with that model so Jeff what's yours all the above maybe so we see a lot of delays in RFPs or tenders customers that put them out and then take a long time to make decisions that's frustrating I think also just customers not realizing the right level of detail that's helpful to a vendor so if you're putting out a tender for something that's a Drupal site and you're specifying modules or versions or anything like that or you're talking about content types or taxonomy or nodes you've gone too far stop and refocus on what problems you're trying to solve and let the vendors who are responding prescribe the appropriate technical implementation I think that's probably the number one that we see more often so yeah sure not that you get me started I think one of the yeah one of the really big mistakes some customers do they don't really reveal their budget at all it's like you would go and try to build a house and they ask like okay how much can you afford to invest well whatever give me an offer for a house it's you know just you can't tell for some cases unless you have some idea what the budget range is and I've been also buying services and I always put in like exact amounts like well this is what it can cost so let us know what the quality would be on that and everything instead of just trying to get the lowest possible price because this is absolutely buying a website is like buying a car or a house without defining anything else if you just get the cheapest one you'll know what you end up getting so changing gears a little bit we've talked quite a bit today about technology platforms let's talk about content because obviously content is the most important aspect the reason that we have a content management system to begin with Olivia can you tell us a little bit about any lessons you have in terms of incorporating legacy content migrating content things like that in terms of Drupal implementations I'm a big fan of automatically sort of scraping and reloading as required but if you're looking at a distributed website or a legacy website that's potentially built in something like Lotus Notes you're not going to get that sort of you're not going to be able to really leverage that so I think procedures and policies come first so how often do you review content what is archive content and sort of what is necessary one thing we have done is across departmental team so people from the different business units represent the content have come along to web training have come along to accessibility training have come along to writing for the web and it's their responsibility to manage the content within the area whether it's migrated or whether it's archived so putting it back on the business units that created it and setting a standard to meet for future part governance in the order that you tackle things but then also ownership right good so I would like to ask all of you because I think this is probably a good question for everybody to be thinking about but what are the biggest blockers for the enterprise to sharing their code back to the community so what examples have you seen in which people are doing a good job of sharing their code back and examples maybe where they're not and why I have two customers one on each side one just started Drupal a year ago large enterprise as well but the right mindset so the background of the person the decision maker that chose the platform across the organization globally he started with that so we wanted to build something we're going to be leveraging what's out there in the community and I wanted to give it back and you Philip as a vendor you do have authorization to whatever code that is not specific to our business it's easy the other organization is just they don't have this mindset they don't have the people with that it's just the whole background think about proprietary think about scary what that means put a code out there and I could really sacrifice my business if I do it so it's really hard to sell them even though we tried a few times so I have an answer how to convince that because I haven't convinced the organization to do that yet but really talks are happening as they see but it's really my experience is really having the right person and really trying to focus on that person within the organization the decision maker is going to be responsible for the platform and since the beginning so we're going to be building this and we wanted to give it back because you know you're leveraging this, this and that from the community and that's just the right thing to do but there's no real recipe I fully agree on the mindset that's the primary thing the traditional enterprise mindset is that every paper says confidential on it basically even if you look at like toilet paper or whatever it's always confidential everything you're trying to patent everything if you can and then take all of your competition to the courts that is pretty obvious these days if you read the news on what Apple and Friends are doing in the courts you try to get patents on everything so that's the traditional mindset and moving from that mindset to hey let's work together with our competition to create more value for us it's a pretty big leap so it's something that in many especially in high-tech companies I think it's a way too big of a leap to do at once so we have a lot of customers who do contribute back quite a bit but none of them are actually in industries where it's really traditional to try to patent and make everything confidential they are more in like media and public sector and so on different kinds of verticals so I think the only way to actually convince them to contribute is to show them success stories we have really lovely stories from our existing customers where they have been doing let's say upgrade from Drupal 5 to 7 and the custom modules we originally wrote from them have already created for free to Drupal 7 because so many sites use those modules already so they ended up saving a lot of money and we have these kinds of stories to tell but I think they only work if the mindset is even somewhat in the same neighborhood if it's completely on the closed side and no nothing leaves this building ever unless somebody pays money for it then it's going to be obvious really really difficult to sell much to add I think the business cases that have worked you're always trying to change your mindset but try and change it at the start rather than the end of the project and if dealing with government always address security concerns I think I have two examples to add one is in the government space in public sector I think the argument there is reuse I think the argument you can make successfully is reuse so if one government agency has developed something that meets certain regulation and presumably done it with public funds why would that same a different agency have to go out and procure the same solution twice so that's a very academic argument you get into the specifics and it becomes very difficult but I think that that's something that appeals to most people in public sector our experience on the commercial side or the enterprise side of things is very similar to Vesas and Felipe's it's different organizations with different mindsets around legal in particular but the most compelling argument I found is really just the dollars and cents of having someone else maintain that code for you and letting people know that if they put something back into the community it's in essence being maintained for free if they have to branch and do things on their own they're in essence either paying their own staff or you as a vendor to potentially keep a branch of that code alive just so that they can use it down the road and that's not a very good business argument so try to attack it from that my experience with a lot of commercial companies is they don't react as well to the open source culture if you will it's more about the business sense so a specific question from an audience member about multi-sites and I suppose also relates to governance in terms of how you manage users within your implementation with multi-sites what are the cost support and security implications especially around people grabbing cool third party components so I'm assuming this is about stopping rogue users from installing and using components on a multi-site architecture I think this is in the end it's not a technology question as such it's more about what sort of policies do you have in place what sort of best practices you have in place how do you train your people you obviously don't let like just anyone install modules on any of your triple installations or if you do I think you have all sorts of problems anyway but if your crazy developers just go on and always install something and things break down I think the problem is actually in some other place than your triple multi-site installation it's about your culture of how do you work and what your quality practices and so on I don't really think there even is a technical bullet for this but of course some of our devs might disagree with me on this so I didn't know but I really really think it's a people question more or less I mean you could implement a lock in to prevent people from developers adding modules but it's not part of the standard I guess you gotta write I mean governance it's really one of the customers is basically defining what's gonna be their platform which means what's gonna be the set of modules that gotta be reused and those are the standard modules as my organization if we need to do one it has to go through some enterprise process which might delay the time to have that module available in the platform but it's really worth to prevent the world developers from adding anything they want making sure that they're getting really stable modules not just beta versions if you're getting a beta version you get some sort of blessing but of course without incurring on the traditional take a long time to add a module process right it still has to be agile has to be fast but some sort of control place to prevent that but really not technical it's really about ensuring it's you're doing the right thing I mean thing one more thing to add on that might be that building an organization where when something gets pushed to production it's not like these developers can do whatever and then you have the maintenance guys to clean up the mess make them clean up their own messes when they break everything a few times and they have to clean it up and they have to explain to the customer when why everything broke down it sort of discourages them to do like the crazy things at least so that might be an easy fix in some cases. So related question about about how to handle coordination amongst people developing on Drupal how do you manage global development teams with a multi-site setup so when teams need to develop on separate sites but also share some global functionality how do you handle that sort of coordination amongst those different parts and I would think that Felipe might be it's a good question we have one big case where we serve a multi-site instance of Drupal in Europe so about 15 to 20 countries now I guess and we start the support of that platform in Brazil and follow this unmet so the process China continues that on the next time so there's some intersection but still how do we do it so we use tools, we make sure that we use Jira all the communication goes smooth between the teams and of course the repository source code is shared but I guess the key is communication there really isn't even if it was a multi-site, if it was just a regular site would be the same it's just process, tools and communication and that's how I mean that, it's being a success right now but as far as multi-site I don't see from development standpoint it's really about other developers in both countries knowing how to deal with the code of course before transitioning to China, we started in Brazil and then to China there was a knowledge transfer phase, make sure that the team could handle that but like you said business as usual you're going to have your team spread out so the key part is communication so we manage communication so there are quite a few alternatives for that yeah we have a bit different situation where everybody is within two time zones basically so communication is a bit easier based on my personal experience where I would say like make it work locally first it's quite typical to go into distributed teams right away but if it's possible try to get everybody in the same room in the beginning when you are starting and grow it out from there, especially if you are trying to learn something new like let's say you want to transform your organization into being agile it's really difficult to do in a beginning if it's a distributed organization it's much easier to do in a beginning when somebody is in the same room and the communication is quite a bit easier that's the first thing the second thing we do in order to get people work cross borders basically make sure they meet face to face and drink some beer more or less that's the thing so we airlines like us but of course those are short flights so we get people together when we get new people and we have a lot of projects where we have mixed teams because our markets are in between let's say the UK and Latvia the price difference can be it's not exactly tenfold but almost so there are like massive price differences on the markets so Latvians can easily work to UK but if you send somebody from the UK to a Latvian customer that's going to eat up the budget really quickly so we can mix between markets but we have to be a bit careful on how to mix so mostly what this means is we just send people to stay at another office for extended periods like weeks or months because working together is really all about knowing the people as well so initially they meet face to face and when they actually get to know the teams and know the people then it's no longer so important you have to meet every now and then but not on a weekly or daily basis we also do this if we have problems with the project we get everybody on the same room including the customer and that tends to get problems fixed so even with all the videoconferencing like FaceTime is still quite invaluable in that I think there's like 1,001 other things but I was going to go back to the governance as well so once you establish the process so who is going to be managing that platform the global features how that can be enabled across countries so I'm going to make sure all the teams are aware of how things can be done so it's all about the governance of the platform okay another very provocative Drupal questions it's after launch and people need something try to give this one just your most fiery answer you can give there's one thing about Drupal that frustrates you what would it be okay, only one I don't get the name many I'm going to say the logo sucks I would think the one thing that is underway in Drupal 8 much better I was just talking before this session it's the whole move to production management so that's something that is not perfect and we know that other products do better this so managing the push between stage and prod and managing content in prod or staging so it depends on the maturity of your content so that's something that we had to either use a few modules like deploy modules etc and customize a little bit based on the requirements and in the end of the day always end up creating scripts to manage that the way they need it so I guess that's the part that we as assistants struggle more because every customer they want to do a different way and there's not a single solution in the Drupal yet for that you can do several ways just like in this sbs case there's different ways of doing things and for that particular one which I think is very critical to eventually come out with two tops ways or just one idea of doing those content and code and configuration pushes between the environments I guess that's the thing that we as a management support as well the support have to be very careful when pushing things in different environments yeah perhaps I can now try to answer for real I got my brain moving it's 3 in the morning for me sorry if I'm a bit slow I think my personal like favorite topic on what's wrong with Drupal today is Drupal marketing there's like us and Aquias and all sorts of other companies out there doing a lot of Drupal marketing on their own so I'm sure all of the markets have one or two or ten companies doing Drupal marketing all the time and we are basically doing the same things over and over and over again we've been trying to change this as we being the Drupal Association in this case where I'm a board member as well but it's slow going and hopefully we get to change it at least slightly during this year already to pool all of the marketing things together but it turns out doing open source marketing is quite a bit more difficult than technology because in marketing you can't do like branches and forks and everything all the time or you can but it's not going to be really great marketing and everybody wants to do like different marketing messages so I don't know I hope we can do it because at least I'm sick of paying for a lot of the European Drupal marketing on our own I would much rather pay it together with everybody else I'm sure Aquias feels the same way so that's probably my favorite topic at the moment I'd have to agree with that production being a little bit messy and changing but I guess the other thing is like any CMS it can get incredibly heavy incredibly quickly I don't think there's a module for that I think there's about 50 modules for that and making the wrong choices for the organization or for the solution can have a lot of consequences that the initial phase doesn't really pick up so I guess planning ahead and knowing the technology before you actually implement it I think no one had actually asked a question so I'm going to insert my own question as part of this answer which is talent I think one of the things I've heard over and over again and I think Felipe mentioned earlier is you know how many of you feel in general like you're struggling to get the right resources either hired or contracted or whatever that's a decent number of people so I guess let me ask you guys a question how do you find good or develop or build good triple talent in the organizations that you work in like I said before we develop our own training center within the organization so new developers we get them of course knowing programming skills having programming skills having no PHP that's of course one step ahead otherwise they go towards the learning PHP first phase and then go towards Drupal and after a couple years we've been able to optimize this training in a way that we can do it in a couple weeks and then have a developer almost as good as a guy that has been doing Drupal in four years but before that was really struggling to find that initially in Brazil but I would know Drupal the level that we needed to those people to know I feel like there's a lot being done in that area I remember Dries Keynote in Denver I guess last year about the talent pool there was a kid in the pool so the Drupal training day last year was I think the four editions were a success there's a couple there's four more happening this year as well so I think things are getting better for us starting to hire in China so it was a better scenario than in Brazil when I started down there but still there's a bit of a challenge but I think the association the community are doing their best towards that area I think I have to do this in two different parts because we are in a sort of strange situation we have too much people people are applying jobs and we have too many talented people applying for jobs we just can't take all of them in and it's like part of that is we've always focused only on two primary things customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction basically and this actually it's a small community and we have a fairly solid reputation in the community so people with experience apply for jobs and we do have a lot of customer demand as well but it's a consulting organization so you can't throw in people 50 people in right now that would just break down the entire organization because you can only grow on a certain rate while still being profitable at the same time and this is all of the like there's all of these like triple hiring companies out there calling us every week like do you need new people it's like no we have like 50 people lined up for like new jobs as soon as we can take them in but I realize that this is globally definitely not the situation and even in Europe most of our customers are trying to hire like small in-house teams and they have huge difficulties hiring and so on so what we've done on that that part is we've done cooperation with universities and and done some like free training in universities to mostly to promote triple because if you go in for like two days or three days and you talk them about triple and you teach them how to do stuff with that you're not gonna get like extremely talented triple people out of that but hopefully you will get like people that are interested in triple and will learn it afterwards and you will in few years time you will get a lot of triple talent so training is one thing another thing we are trying to push like actively some sort of triple certification program that's another of my personal favorites as well and going nowhere but hopefully one of these days will have something like that so those things I think are probably the ones I can think of we attack it in a few ways we have some full time staff who are developers and designers and they have a fairly strong connection with one another and share learnings quite often we hire in resources whether it be individuals or consultancies when we're doing bigger projects and need more resources in terms of contracting out we haven't always found the best company but we've found some good ones lately so I think it's a little bit of everything making sure we're learning from previous projects and sort of upskilling while we go along I will say though that I think Drupal could do with a little bit more promotion in Australian universities I was working with some friends who were lecturers the other day and they sort of said what's going on in industry what should we be teaching I did mention Drupal and apparently a whole lot of other senior academics had said anything but Drupal so it does have a little bit of a perception problem in some areas and I think that could go a long way we do have some fairly talented programmers that are still in school and still in university and I think tapping into that would be a huge bonus for Australia because I know that we do at times have limitations okay so you're trying to convince your boss, your customer someone that you believe needs to be on Drupal what are the top things that you think make Drupal what are the selling points for Drupal that you think are incredibly important for people to understand besides cost I'm going to go with one of my favorite ones that isn't used often enough there is competition I know I work for the Australian Competition Consumer Commission but I've also worked in other parts of government where they've sort of locked themselves down to a single vendor technology and just the impact on that and the delays that you can incur so I do think that there's competition out there and that it's broadly used for people to understand how often it's broadly used so selling some of the success stories but there's also quite a few companies that support it and good ones I would go with the references existing Drupal sites out there and the community being to primary things these are really special for Drupal even if you compare against other open source communities and other open source products it's pretty difficult to find any product that would have as great references as Drupal has globally Yeah I agree with that it's really to beat almost a million developers I guess in the DO that we can see over there registered it's really hard so showing off the community what you can get out of that community basically what I sell is time to market especially for the commercial area if you really wanted to get a module after a new social network couple of weeks ago most likely going to have a module like Xena said in the beginning someone has built that so it's really fast for you to really keep up with the market and that along with flexibility as well which gives you too much power so you have to have control of that responsibility but the flexibility of Drupal is really a key point when I'm selling to different organizations as well Okay we're almost done I'm going to mix it up a little bit just to see if we can get our panelists back answering some tough questions throwing a lot of softballs here I want to get a tough one out there so does anybody in the audience have a real stumper for this crew up here when you have a question you want to ask the panel right now live question something hard alright where will the web be in 10 years that's an easy one I think it's going to be quite a bit like it's today it's just going to be a lot more of everything and a lot more of everywhere yeah I guess probably goes down to the same point about the internet of things getting a little bit more technical about the API so being able to provide like I guess Peewa was saying in the keynote about being able to provide data and service across the board so I guess that's where we're going to be able to reach out to any API anywhere and get the data and provide business value for whatever we're building I guess that's the rest of the API that's a key part evolving somehow in 10 years definitely but I think we're going to be sticking with the standard which I think is great I do hope that big business and governments sort of set the tone and do develop shared standards and that there's not so much clutter and noise and that it is a bit more open because I am very strongly into the quality of access for information but I think there's also risk of it going the other way and various countries around the world controlling and limiting access so I do think that we have an incredible power but we also have incredible risk okay well thank you everyone appreciate all the great questions you had and thank you to all the panelists for your thoughts and your time so everyone please thank the panelists