 Okay, so we will officially get started. So, my name is Ron Northcutt. I'm the director of developer advocacy at Acquia and I'm joined with... Yeah, I'm Maggie Schroeder. I'm the director of product marketing at Acquia. Happy to be here. Yeah, and we wanted to do a session today about selling free software and talking through kind of the way to think about it, especially for people that are not salespeople, that don't have sales training, why that's important, and then we've got a ton of information, we've kind of compacted down. It's kind of like a crash course in selling Drupal, which actually is very similar to some of the internal enablement we use for our sales team at Acquia. So there's a lot of this stuff that we've made accessible now for the community. Real quick before we get started, if you haven't already gotten it, if you want, we'll pop this up again at the end. The slides are available. There's a lot of information here. So again, it's gonna be kind of useful as a reference to come back to. So if you will pull that up again at the end, and I've got a bitly link too. So if you guys want to get a copy of these, that will be good, okay? Just give everybody a second there. Yeah, definitely take a look at this and use these slides. They're all, I'd say great resources, just have up and have in your back pocket. So here's what we're gonna be talking about today. Number one, I'm gonna talk about selling free software, which is such a crazy idea. And what it means to sell, and especially what it means for somebody who's not necessarily a salesperson, and how we kind of think about breaking that down into the roles who's involved in the decision process, why they're involved, how that's shifting and changing in the industry. We're gonna dig in a little bit to some of the common objections, and we're gonna talk about it from the perspective of the marketer, the non-developer, their concerns, their issues, and then from more of the technical side, how we might think about responding to that and helping to answer those questions and allay those fears. And then we've got a quick evaluation guide, which is just some simple notes on if you're talking about a project, you're looking at Drupal versus WordPress or Adobe or Contentful, where the pros and cons are, so you can help make a good choice. And then finally, I'm gonna talk about some different places you can look to get some help with that. So we've got some quotes in here. This is the first one, honesty and integrity are absolutely essential for success in all life, all areas of life. Does anybody know who Zig Ziglar is? It's a crazy name, seeing a few nods. So there you go, yeah. Yeah, so Zig Ziglar is like one of those classic kind of sales coaches, lots of materials there back in the day. And one of the things that I always liked about it when I was at a sales background was that this kind of concept is very compatible with the way we think about community. And so we're gonna see this theme as we go through this, because again, selling isn't just about trying to go make money or trying to talk somebody and doing something. Selling is about finding a good solution and making sure that we're doing the right thing for the team and the project. So I'm gonna jump right in. I'm gonna go through these quickly because we gotta get over to the other piece, but selling free software, you wouldn't think it would be that hard. And the first thing we'll talk about is if I'm not a sales person, why should I even, why would I even think about selling Dribble? Why would that be useful? And Maggie, maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the times when someone might need to sell for this free software. Yeah, definitely. I mean, has anyone here experienced that selling internally to other stakeholders? Yeah, for sure. Call clients. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it can be hard, right? Not everyone's familiar with Dribble. I know when I first jumped into Dribble three years ago, I was talking about it at home and with a couple of my roommates at the time and they were like, Dribble, it sounds like strudel, like what is that? And so it's hard to even explain it to people who aren't familiar and aren't part of the community sometimes. So a lot of times you're going to want to talk about Dribble in the context of using Dribble for a new project or extending an existing project. Why should we stay with Dribble for this project? In many other different use cases there, right? So there's a lot of opportunity to talk about and educate stakeholders like myself three years ago when I was just learning about Dribble about why it's beneficial for different projects. So a lot of opportunity. Yeah, and also, I don't know how many of you are familiar with it, there's still a lot of people on Dribble 7. And we know that going from 7 to, you know, now 9 plus is a big bit of a leap, right? It's a replatform. And so there's an opportunity there for organizations to reevaluate whether or not they should replatform and stay on Dribble or go somewhere else. So these conversations are going to continue happening and where it makes sense, we want to try and keep folks in the community because it's a great tool. Now I'm going to say this a few different ways, a few different times going through this because again, sometimes sales gets a bad rap because there are some not so great sales people. Most of them, in my personal experience, are fantastic. I'm sure y'all are amazing. And Pantheon party tonight, so maybe we'll see you there. But it's really not, it's not so much about money or trying to, or power even at the end of the day, it's really about trying to help educate people, understand what you're trying to accomplish and then helping make sure that that's a good choice. The sales part of selling is really more about being an advocate. So coming in and understanding what you're trying to do, the solution you think is going to be best for everybody and then advocating for that solution. Hopefully a lot of the times, Drupal is the choice you advocate for, but it might not be. And that's something to keep in mind. We don't have to worry too much because Drupal's amazing, it's getting better all the time. That's not the hard part. The hard part, as Maggie explained, is like telling people about it, sharing it and helping them understand what's going on. I will say as someone who is a pretty big Drupal fan myself, it can be really tempting to want to Drupal everything because Drupal can do anything, but it's not always the right choice. And so it's really important for us as advocates for the project to understand where it's a good fit and where it's not and make sure that we're doing what's right because something that you don't want is you don't want to win the battle and lose the war. You don't want to have Drupal approved for a project and turn out to be a wrong choice. That hurts your credibility. That hurts the credibility of the community as a whole and of the project. So let's make good use of it where it makes sense. So another Zig Ziglar quote, stop selling, start helping. And that's that kind of thread. Provide value and help people and go through this. So now Maggie's gonna talk about some of the roles, how this stuff is changing and the resources, the influence that we typically see across the industry. Yeah, definitely. And to give a little context too. So I've been in marketing for a while now, five years almost. And one of my first roles was updating product pages. And I worked very closely with my developer at the time. He actually sat right behind me. We were an open floor plan. And I just remember turning around and being like, hey, Attilio, can you update this for me? So I'm that annoying marketer. So it kind of brings us to those two stakeholders, right? We've got content creators and we've got developers. How many of you would consider yourself a content creator? Someone who maybe is more on the content side of the house? Got one up here. Awesome. Very cool. How many of you are developers? Love to see it, love to see it. That's awesome. And it's a common thread, right? I'm sure all of you as developers who raised your hand, you interact with content creators maybe on a daily basis, weekly. They might be pesky like me turning around every 10 minutes being like, hey, can you help me update this? Because I don't know what I'm doing. Luckily, three years in Drupal, I'm getting a little bit better there. But if we get to the next slide, Ron, if you will, 61% of the marketing budget is going towards digital initiatives. And actually, fun fact, 10% of that is focused exclusively on SEO. So the marketing team has vested interest in content that's being created digitally. And they need support, right? Most marketers fit more into that, and say less so into an ambitious site builder and more into a basic site builder. So they lean and rely heavily on developers. I know I did, again, early in my career. And the other facet of this, right, is that 60% of developers have the ability and have really the upper hand there. They're the ones who are, you're all the ones, directing the project, choosing the technology. Because you know what's going to be the best fit for the project. So I'd say my number one takeaway here is that with that relationship with your marketers, right, you've got the ability to be the trusted advisor, to be the one who suggests the right solution. And so it doubles down on Ron's point about choosing the right solution and advocating for Drupal. And that's what we're here to help you do. I just want to point out one thing real quick. I've found on Unsplash some of these images and some of the same people, which are really lights that kind of, you'll notice we'll see the same characters as we go through. And I thought this was so great, such a beautiful smile. Someone's very engaging and listening to the other person talk. And it's so wonderful. And then I realized when you take that and put it in the context of the developer has the ability to prove or reject, it almost seems like, yes, that project's not going to happen the way you think. But I'm sure this person is very lovely, very nice, and is trying to help as we've been talking through. So. Yeah. And so again, like who has more power? Who gets to decide on the solution? And I kind of just gave away the answer there. It's really about a partnership, right? It's about building a team, working together and deciding what are the features, the functions that we need, what are the goals we're trying to achieve, and then working together to decide what is the best solution. And of course, everyone in here I'm sure loves Drupal. So we'd love to help you advocate for that. And so again, you're going to have this communication and I mentioned marketing and developers, which is the relationship that I've been in. But of course, there are many other content creators. So you are going to have a project owner and then also a trusted advisor. And these roles are going to, again, be very fluid, but it's always going to be something where we can jump in and we can offer, again, a trusted opinion, which hopefully again, from the rest of the slides today, you'll get more resources on how to be a trusted advisor and where Drupal is the best fit. Yeah. And one thing to point out too, if you'll notice the last bullet point here, this is kind of how I always think about it. Coming from a background as a sales engineer, I was responsible in that case for owning the technical win, the technical decision. Can this solve the problem? Is this going to check the boxes? Is this going to give you what you need? They may not go with that choice, but my job was to ensure that that was going to work. So on the other hand, we have someone who's responsible for the business decision. Somebody who's got the mandate, they've got the budget, they've got the need. At the end of the day, it's their neck on the line if this project's going to be successful or fail. So they've got that interest. That's where that partnership comes in with the trusted advisor who's typically going to be more technical, who's going to help guide, advise, figure out what the right way to move forward is, and come up with the technical decision on what we're going to need. Again, being able to kind of help inform or even override some of those other choices. So a very good partnership to have. You want to get us on this quote? Yeah, absolutely. So you will get all you want in life. If you help enough other people, get what they want. And so, you know, I feel like Zick Ziggler's pretty true to his word. Yeah. He's very consistent. I just love that it's so easy to find these kind of community-oriented quotes coming from a person that teaches sales folks. I don't think they got a quarterly quote. Well, no, he was definitely a personality, that's for sure. So let's put some of this into practice. So what we're going to do here in this section, and Maggie's going to take it over, is we're going to go through some of the common objections. We're going to talk about FUD, I don't know if any of you have heard of that term. And then some of the common objections people either have heard or they might be scared about or they got burned on another project or maybe there is a competitive situation and somebody's trying to sell their service, saying, oh, you don't want to use Drupal because yada, yada, yada. These are not all of the objections you're going to hear, but these are kind of the big groupings. So what we're going to do for each one of these, we'll go through them quickly. And there's too much here to read. But what we're going to do is, Maggie's going to talk about, from her perspective, as that business owner, why these concerns matter, kind of how that works. And then I'm going to come in as the trusted advisor and explain where that's valid, where it may not be, and how we can move forward with that. Awesome, let's kick it off. So, right, we're talking about FUD. So fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It's funny, I actually feel like I introduced this at Acquia. I said FUD and everyone looked at me like I had 10 heads the first time that I said it. But again, we're going to go through a lot of the different FUD that comes up with Drupal. How many of you have experienced pushback when trying to pursue a Drupal project in your organization or with a customer? Yeah, a little bit. At least a couple. Nice, yeah. I mean, it definitely happens. And it's something where, once again, my roommates, Drupal strudel, right? People just don't know really what Drupal is, what it does. The power has the features, the functionality. And so, again, some of the common objections that we've seen, again, are security, legacy software. PHP is bad. Ooh, it's expensive, which, again, free. So, what's going on here? Complicated, and again, people are scared of open source. I don't know what's up with that. I just clearly haven't been to a Drupal con. And then lack of support. So, we'll go through these kind of one by one, and I'll give you a little bit of insight into why a business user might have these types of objections. So, the first one, security, right? I think that this always comes back to open source and the fear of open source. It's going away slowly, right? More and more organizations are adopting open source, but there's still that lingering fear of security, right? And of course, because it's open, they can see how many security releases come out, but what they don't see, right, is that with the closed, proprietary CMS, you don't even see those updates, right? It's not transparent. You don't know what's being updated, what's not secure. And I'm already debating. But yeah, and again, a lot of different concerns from business users around security. But when we respond to that, and Ron, do you want to give the response? So the great news is that when it comes to security, there are tons of real world examples. Lots of governments, lots of federal organizations in the US and across the world. There are lots of large financial institutions, colleges, just you name it across the board that are using this and using Drupal really well. The other thing to really talk through when people have this concern is help them understand things like the security team, the Drupal-Steward program, the fact that there's all of this that's built around making sure things are tested properly, that we have common vulnerabilities are blocked. And but really, and we'll come back to this kind of the open source piece as well, it's because there is that transparency and their openness, you can't hide. So if you're using a proprietary system, just because you can't see the vulnerability doesn't mean it's not there. It's not good to just bury your head in the sand. At least here, we know what the problems are and when they come out, we know what they are. And we've put these systems in place to reduce how many security vulnerabilities might show up, what best practices are to prevent them. And then on the other side, there are things like the Drupal-Steward program, which help make sure that even when they do happen, you're already covered before it gets out. So really good stuff, super strong with security, not something I worry about. What's the next big problem? Yeah, let's go into the next one. So legacy software. Right, again, people who aren't familiar with Drupal clearly didn't attend the Drees note that we just saw and we all know this isn't legacy, right? This is going somewhere it's innovative and has an amazing future. But again, business users might not be familiar with Drupal, right? So they'll say like this code is 20 years old. It's not modern, but really again, we all know the inner workings there. Or I want a modern application using JS mock headless. And again, this is a business user hearing these buzzwords and thinking, oh, we need this and what they don't understand is that what we all know. And Ron, if you want to give the other half of that, what would you tell someone who said that? So in that case, what I usually come back to is a couple of things. And again, there's a lot of information here and it depends on who you're talking to and what their primary concern is. But the fact that Drupal is 20 years old, as we all know, Drupal has reinvented itself a number of times and every time it's gotten better. And now it actually is a full modern stack object oriented on top of the latest and greatest that's out there and as we saw, it's accelerating its ability to keep pace with those things. So that part is not really relevant. The place where you're probably gonna get a little bit more pushback is as Maggie said, when people are hearing these buzzwords, headless, decoupled, JavaScript applications. And that's great because Drupal does both. Drupal is great for a more traditional CMS when you need something that's very directed. It's great for when you wanna use those low-code tools, whether it's some of the tools out there like Gutenberg or Site Studio or even just Layout Builder and Core, the new CK Editor 5, which is a wonderful experience. It's got all of these things that give you a lot more power to compose and put things together. But if your project requires a headless CMS, if it requires a super robust API services layer, Drupal has that built-in at Core, not bolted on later, not an add-on down the road. It is baked into the core of how Drupal works. So the important thing here to realize is that the fact that Drupal has this long life is great because it's continuously evolved as opposed to being, this is the flavor of the week, this is something that's so new, the bugs haven't been worked out yet and we don't know what doesn't work. We know really well what works here and there are tons and tons of great stories. And if you wanna know some of my favorites, find me after and I'll tell them to you. Yeah, and I'm pretty sure, Ron, you like to call that future-ready, not future-proof. That's correct. If anybody says future-proof, they're trying to sell you a car, there's no such thing. But you can be future-ready and that's what Drupal does by being composable and extensible. Yeah, and that brings us to our next one. So PHP backend, right? And I would say a lot of business users might not know what PHP is, like what the value is there, right? So they'll know, maybe they've heard mumblings about how it's an insecure language. Maybe they've heard that it's hard to find PHP developers or that they wanna use a modern language, once again, going back to buzzwords, right? They hear what they hear and not much else. So it's our job to educate them. And so again, Ron, if you wanna enlighten us on what you would tell someone who maybe have heard some of these rumors. Yeah, sure. A lot of the stuff that people are gonna pull out is gonna be old information. And so if they have specific things, you can usually find out they're talking about like PHP 4, PHP 5, things like that. More modern versions don't typically have that problem. But again, go back to the real-world examples. Over 80% of all websites are powered by PHP. There's between six and seven million PHP developers in the world. It's robust, it's powerful, it's tried, it's true, it's continuing to evolve on its own as well. And actually, a lot of people may not know, even though there's been this renaissance with JavaScript and it's becoming even more powerful and it's a wonderful tool we should use and we're doing it more and more, JavaScript and PHP were created at the same time. They're both just as old as the other and they both evolved and they both have different capabilities and functionalities. So the last thing, if sometimes we'll hear people coming from another technology, .NET's a big one, and they'll have questions about, well, I don't know PHP. So it doesn't matter. It's a C-based language, it's object-oriented. If you know how to write code, you're gonna be fine. There's a few little things that might be a little different but it's everything you're gonna expect. Well, and then expensive, which again, crazy. We're talking about selling free software. But sometimes that comes up, right? And it's a valid worry, right? Of course, business users are always worried about the cost and the cost implications of a project. And so of course, they think Drupal, okay, they've heard it's complex. So they don't wanna build everything custom. It's gonna take a lot of time. It's gonna be super expensive. Or we don't have a large team. How are we gonna do that with the amount of people we have? And our budget's limited, right? And that's everyone nowadays, right? We're expected to do more with the same amount of resources or maybe even less. And of course, we prefer to start small and then grow. And we all know what kind of trouble that can get us into if we don't scope a project correctly. So Ron, again, if you're hearing this from a business user like me. Well, if I'm hearing that, I'm like, well, I've got good news for you because Drupal is composable and it's specifically designed to let you take pieces and put them together. And Drupal really empowers you as an ambitious site builder to get on Dries's track here to often use configuration over code. So there's often a lot of things that we do through the UI by configuring things and doing things in the admin interface that you can get a really long way before you actually have to write custom code. And then often you can find a module or a plugin or an integration that's gonna do the thing you need. And my recommendation is always to keep the amount of custom code as small as possible. As a developer, I love to write new stuff but as a developer, I hate to maintain it. So if I can kind of use what's out there and use the system as much as possible, it's gonna enable me to move a lot faster. So we're on the same page so far with all of this. Yeah, I think so. I'm right there with you. All right, it's complicated. I feel like this one is pretty common, at least from what I've experienced in talking to our customers, right? There's this common misconception that it's super complex. It's actually one where when I first logged in to Drupal the first time, I was very overwhelmed. But again, everything that we saw at the Dries note, we know that that's not true. We know that there are ways to make the barrier of entry lower. But again, you might hear from business users and especially marketers, right? Like we need to be able to update content. Like we wanna be involved in this and we don't feel like we have a way. And that Drupal's for developers, right? Again, another common misconception that we saw just today, site builders are really at our core but a lot of business users don't know this. And finally, of course, like all of the modules and the coding that's required, right? It's kinda tough, especially for a business user to understand. And so Ron, how would you educate a marketer? And I know that you helped educate me a lot. So just as a funny side note, when I got started at AQUI almost eight years ago, I was in the, I was a sales engineer in the pre-sales department and working as a, coming from a developer background. And I, one of my first big lessons after I started doing some of my first business, my first meetings and demos was had someone take me aside and said, okay, Ron, just to give you some feedback, you're too honest. Now, they weren't saying I was too honest and saying that I should lie. What they were saying was that I was scaring the pants off of these business people because they're like, oh hey, can you do this? And I'm like, oh yes, there's like five different ways to do it. You can do it this way or this way or you can grab this module or you can write this custom code. And I'm super excited about all of the potential and I'm trying to share with you how great it is. Meanwhile, their eyes are getting big and their glazes are like this sounds like a nightmare. I don't wanna touch this thing. And I had to learn how to pull myself back and when someone says, so can I do this? And I'm like, there's the five different ways based on what they've said. This is probably the best way. Yes, you can. And there's a module here. It's probably gonna work for you just right. Next question. Keep it simple. So the good news is that, as I mentioned earlier before we started, Drupal is kind of the original low code application builder. We created this concept of a site builder that wasn't a developer that could do the things that they wanted to do. And when it does get complicated, when there are big decisions to be made, when you need to configure and set things up in a certain way, guess what? You have me. You have the trusted advisor. You have the person who's gonna help you figure out what you need and help figure out how to give that to you and empower you to have these self-service tools to do the things you wanna do to move quickly. And we can take the power that's there and present it to you and make your life better and make it simpler. Cool. And then that brings us to open source. Again, we touched on this a little bit, but there is, for some reason, people are scared of open source, right? That they feel like we use whatever brand insert your favorite or least favorite one in there. And open source isn't for us, right? They just think, that's not us. We won't do that. Why would we adopt open source? And they don't trust it, right? There's a lack of trust with open source and that's still, again, a common misconception, especially with business users who aren't familiar with the power that open source can provide to a project. And then it means we have to give away our IP. That's definitely something that I've heard a couple times at least. And open source is free, so it's not as good as something you pay for. Again, another crazy misconception. You can see where I lie on this one. I'm getting definitely further away from that skeptical business user, but Ron, again, what would you tell someone? Well, the first thing I tell people when they have concerns or questions about open source, and we see this less and less every year, but you still see it in more conservative organizations, large institutions, financial services, government, exactly, yeah. Well, so we know how to address that. That's actually not true, but what I typically will come through in the place that I will start is very, very simple. You're already using open source, and all of those proprietary services, they're using open source too. It's everywhere. It's on almost everything that you use, whether you're on an Android or an iPhone or a Windows machine or Linux. Open source is everywhere, you're already using it. So that's the first place that I usually tap into. And then I'll talk again about the visibility and the code. I don't know how many people know this, but about, I would say three or four years ago, there was a large German institution that was thinking about moving to Drupal. Very conservative, lots of regulations and laws in Germany that they had to comply with. Security was a major concern. They paid a lot of money to a company to go and do a lot of analysis on the Drupal code base. And through that analysis, they found one core security flaw. And they worked with the security team and they got the patch done, they went through the process and everything was out there. You probably have not heard that story because it wasn't a big deal. But the thing that I love about that that's so great is you have this organization that invested a lot of time and a lot of money in trying to go through and figure out if they could even use this thing. And immediately the results of that investment were poured back out into the community. So open source actually is better because we get to pull from all of those resources. If you go to proprietary system, they might have dozens or even hundreds of developers. We have like millions and everybody's working together to make this thing, make it better. It's definitely one of the coolest things. Anytime I have a question, it's amazing to have a community where there's so many people to answer even my simplest questions, especially because I'm still so new to Drupal. So that's like one of the most welcoming things. And I think people who aren't familiar with Drupal just might not have reaped those benefits, which kind of brings us to our next one, support, right? Feeling like you're not supported. It's funny that in a coincidence there. But again, we want a commercial proprietary system again, name your favorite, your least favorite because they want the support from that organization or it doesn't have an SLA, uptime guarantees or it could disappear tomorrow. That's like a fear, but clearly, again, look at the crowd that was at the tree's note. We're not going anywhere. And of course, we don't want to have the risk of having to own the system. And so again, more things from a business user where they're just not as familiar with, again, how open source works. So another opportunity to educate. Yeah, so as Maggie just pointed out, drill's been around a long time. It's not going anywhere anytime soon. And there's an entire ecosystem. That's why we're all here. You can go in the expo hall and I would advise you do. Is anybody doing the little booth bingo thing to try and win some of those prizes? The passport? Your passport and you get stamps. Yeah, I haven't done it myself, although I was pretty tempted. But I highly recommend you go and check it out. There are tons of agencies, there are tons of freelancers in the community that are willing to help. There are organizations like platform organizations like PlatformSH or Pantheon or Aquia who provide that depending on what you need, whether it's something fast, you need something managed, you need some consulting, you need something architected, you need an SLA, you need FedRAMP compliance. There's going to be someone somewhere that's gonna be able to help you. The support is there and actually it's better than you're gonna get from some proprietary source because they typically have a primary support model, unless you're like a Microsoft where they've kind of created their whole ecosystem. We have our whole ecosystem as well. So typically that can be even better than what we saw. So Maggie, you wanna close us out on this section? Yeah, for sure. So people don't buy for logical reasons, they buy for emotional reasons. So I think we covered like a lot of the emotional aspect of that and also the hearing of rumors, especially on the business side. So it's definitely useful to sit down and again, going back to that partnership, having that ability to have communication with your colleagues who are also in it together with you. So in this final section, we're gonna go through kind of an evaluation guide. We're gonna look at some of the common competition that you're likely to come up and we've broken it into four groups because there's a ton of different options out there but primarily other open source projects, large, big DXP platforms, those are typically gonna be big, expensive, enterprise grade solutions. Headless SaaS platforms have become very, very popular, very useful lately, we'll talk about those. And then also some of the low-code SaaS platforms that are out there as well. So I'm gonna start with the first one here and what you'll notice, I don't know, is anybody familiar with the SWOT analysis pattern? Strength, weakness, opportunity, threat. So we're taking kind of this similar thing. What we're talking about here is for something that is like, WordPress is an example. It's not just WordPress but it's an example. Where does it do well? What does it do well? Where is it weak? Where is it not a good fit? What are things to ask about? Are there places that it might not be good or you wanna drill in? And then where are places where this particular solution might give you a hard time? And again, remember, going back to the beginning, we wanna make sure that we're focused on finding the best solution for the project. So if it's WordPress, then you should advocate for WordPress. But hopefully it's gonna be dribble a lot. So as you can see here, WordPress or another open source solution is great because it's open source. Typically it'll be easier to use. Very few frameworks are quite as mature when it comes to things like security and performance, the config over customization, something Drupal does insanely well. And then like we said, having those services in core, those are places where Drupal's really strong and it's hard to find another open source project that's as good in those areas. Things you wanna ask about are things like, how many sites you're gonna need over time? What are the ideas for future customization? Is it gonna be relatively simple? Is it gonna stay there? Are we looking for something that's ambitious, an ambitious digital experience? How agile do we need to be? What kind of team do we have? We wanna try and reuse some of this code over and over. And think about things like the budget or if there's existing WordPress experience that might make it either a threat to Drupal as a project choice or an opportunity to take advantage of. But going on to the DXP platform. Yeah, definitely. If you haven't seen the DXP Magic Quadrant, that's kind of who we're thinking about here, right? So large enterprise platforms, Adobe is just one of them, right, great example. But again, where does it do well with enterprise organizations most of the time? And they provide lots of tools and lots of marketing technology, right? So going from content to also the data side of the house. And then also having a large budget because oftentimes these DXP organizations, they come with a hefty price tag. And so where is it not a good fit? Probably someone with a leaner budget or where they're looking to cut back. Again, I mentioned everyone's looking to do more with less. So it's a lot of organizations, teams that are very agile and they're looking for a best to breed strategy and looking to go really fast, right? A lot of times the Adobe's and other DXP players are going to be more monolithic and a little bit slower to move. And also going back to future ready, right? They might claim future proof, but are they future ready? Maybe not so much. And so it's important to ask about costs, ask about timeline goals. And again, really look at, do you have the talent to support something like that as well because oftentimes these DXP platforms take a lot of maintenance. And of course, just pay attention to like high reliance already on those types of products, right? That's going to be a place where maybe it is a better fit, right? And then of course, executive and marketing approval. Once again, going back to an executive who might have a strong preference for one of the DXP players. Yeah, and just the one note I will add, Maggie mentioned the magic quadrant for people who don't know like Gartner, Forster, the industry analyst. Drupal is, we kind of lead it at awkward, but Drupal is a leader in the space. So if you're up against something like this and you're trying to find a good fit, don't be intimidated. Drupal is an excellent choice and is typically like in the top two or three. So headless ass. We've been seeing a lot more of this lately, right? In the last few years, things like Contentful, ContentStack, Prismic, it's like an explosion of these companies offering these solutions. And they could be really, really great. We're seeing that especially when you have an actual need for headless CMS, you've got multiple channels, you've got a team of JavaScript developers are going to love it. It's going to be fantastic. When you have highly structured data that is going to be tied specifically into components and applications, it can make it really easy to do those things. And when the marketers experience it's typically going to be more of that data entry, putting in that structured data. But the problems that we see are you typically will lose a lot of those site builder, low code kind of experiences. So a lot of marketers, a lot of business people that aren't developers, they may not be able to get really good control over the layout and the experience. Typically, if you don't have a really robust developer team, small teams can do great here, but if you don't have a strong developer team then IT can end up becoming a bottleneck, which is not what you want. And then if you do have a lot of different sites, a lot of different applications, you're trying to think about how do we scale, how do we have kind of governance here. Drupal is so incredibly good as a multi-site tool in managing many sites from a single code base. It's just one of the best in the world there. So the things to ask about are my primary question, I always wanna know is who owns the experience? Who owns assembling the experience? If it's a developer, then a headless ass solution might actually be the right choice. Drupal can do this really, really well. And there's Contenta, and we're working on AcreCMS headless, or you can just turn on JSON API and GraphQL and go to the races. Drupal can fit really well there, that's not a problem, but if it's a developer owning the experience, then that headless CMS space will be most likely a good choice. However, if it's a marketer that needs to own the experience and wants to put the pieces together and assemble the content and have control over those things, it's gonna be a challenge without those low-code tools. And so that's typically something you're gonna wanna look at. You're also gonna wanna take a look at things like cost. It can be really challenging to adequately budget because a lot of these headless solutions are based on the number of API calls that you make. And so it's really easy to create something that is heavily reliant on making those API calls, which means that the costs are gonna scale way up. Something like Drupal, on the other hand, is heavily focused on caching and offloading the CDN, so you can get a lot more performance there. Also, if you have things like regional requirements for data storage or for where things are hosted, like for example, a lot of these SAS tools are in one part of North America, East Coast, West Coast. So if you do have a global presence and you need to have certain things in certain areas for compliance reasons or because of lag or things like that, that could be a place that you need to dig into. And then finally, when you're looking at places where, again, Drupal might have a harder time, it's gonna be where you have a really strong JavaScript developer team. They're gonna be advocating probably for something like this. I put this in quotes, hype around headless because I'm not saying this. This is actually what we hear from those industry analysts. The fact that headless CMS is really hot, it's very trendy, it has a ton of value, but a lot of people think it's just another silver bullet. We know it's not. There's always trade-offs. So don't watch out for when people are kind of swept up in that trendy discussion. And you might be hearing more about the Mock Alliance. The Mock Alliance is a group of companies like Contentful and Commerce Tools that have kind of focused on this philosophy of microservices, APIs, what is the? Containers, yeah, container-based architecture and headless options. And again, it's not that they're necessarily wrong. It's, I think that sometimes they're overstepping and saying it's the best thing for everything. And we know that that's not true. But then for our last one. Yeah, brings us to probably the marketer's favorite, low-code SaaS tools to think like Wix and Squarespace. I don't know if anyone watched the Super Bowl commercials. I barely paid attention to the football, but the commercials are my favorite. Squarespace has that amazing commercial with the Winona Ryder. Appeals to people, makes it really easy to understand why this would provide value. So again, where it does well, small sites, a common everyday person can just log in and create a site really quickly. Short-lived sites, it's great for that. And like anyone who has got a really low technical budget, right? And then where it's not such a great fit, larger sites, for internal, if there's a necessity for internal integrations, not going to be the best fit there. And then of course, if you need any type of customization, there's not much flexibility there with these low-code SaaS tools. And so it's important to ask about different goals. So like is your site going to grow, right? Is this just your starting point? Do you know you're going to eventually evolve beyond the capabilities that are provided by the low-code SaaS? Also the lifespan of the project, is it just short-term, right? Are you just spinning up maybe something that's again temporary? And then also budget, right? These are pretty cheap options. And so definitely important to understand, do you have a big budget? Do you have enough to maybe invest in something that's more future-ready? And then of course, it's important to pay attention to, right? Text sprawl, it's funny. I don't know if anyone's heard of the concept of shadow IT, right? Kind of doing things to do it fast and going, I don't want to say behind the back, it sounds evil, but, right? Just trying to do something fast and maybe going outside, coloring outside of the lines, let's call it. It definitely happens with marketing too, right? So there can be different, like, marketing sprawl or shadow marketing as well where marketers will, you know, look to spin-up sites quickly with these types of solutions. And there's no way to really control it there. No type of governance built in. And then of course, self-service tendencies as well. So again, talking about that marketer, kind of looking to color outside of the lines. It's because of their need and their want to, you know, again, do things quickly. So definitely something important to pay attention to when this type of solution comes up. Cool? Then we have our obligatory at this point, Ziegler quote, every sale has five basic obstacles. No need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust. So what we want to do is really try and answer some of those. And that last one is the most important. Again, being that trusted advisor and helping to figure out what's the right choice to make here. So Maggie, you want to lead us out here at the end? Yeah, for sure. So yeah, it's definitely hard sometimes to convince others, especially business users who have heard all the rumors we went through, you know, to leverage Drupal, especially when you know it's the right choice. So one of the most important things is we talked about that sense of a team. The team's even bigger than just your organization, right? We're all in this together. And so there's a lot of places to go to get help if you're ever in this type of situation. Of course you'll have access to this deck to leverage, but you know, there's the Drupal Slack, Drupal.org. There are different meetups and agencies that can help you to convince the business users, some of the skeptics and critics, right? That Drupal is in fact the best choice, right? And so, and of course your personal network, we're all here together today. Obviously you'll have access to Ron and I and feel free to come up if you have any questions, but you know, everyone here at this conference, I'm sure would be happy to lend a hand. Yeah, and I think that's the most important thing that value that we have in the community itself. So meeting people, finding those, making those connections, figuring out all of the vendors that are in there, who you're gonna know, who you're gonna keep on your list, and then when you do need help, it can be as simple as, hey, I've got, somebody's asking me a question about this, where do I get the answer? Maybe you jump on Drupal Slack or you do a search and there's someone's ask that question on Drupal.org. Maybe it's something a little more strategic where you know your organization is gonna be doing something and so you go to a local user group or meetup and you just kind of brainstorm with some other people or maybe it's more strategic to find an actual partner to work with, an agency, a platform partner to bring them in, but build that network and they're gonna be able to help you out. Yeah, and you know. Our final, go ahead. Should I do it? Our final, yeah. It's not what you've got, it's what you use that makes a difference. And so you've got Drupal, you've got the community, you've got your experience, you've got a ton of success stories that other companies and organizations have done that you can use and rely on and get inspiration from. So there's a lot of great things that are there. But in conclusion, here's the QR code if you wanna get access to this deck. Should be hopefully a useful resource for you. And then, yeah, any questions from anybody? Has this been helpful, by the way? Yeah, yeah. Question. So hiring developers either through an agency or internally is very expensive because so little of the code base is using this and it also has a cost. So that creates conflict in the organization. So for the recording too, because they might not have caught you. What was your name, sorry? Kevin. Oh, Kevin, I'm moving the dice here. So Kevin was pointing out that actually while there's a lot of PHP developers, not all of them are up to date on the latest stuff and it can be a challenge to find good talent. I think that's a really good point. And so the way that I would actually address that is that that's actually the reason that we're here and that's actually the reason my Drupal is so powerful because you get to leverage the existing work that other people have done. So you can go and grab a module, you can either copy the code, you can take it, you can rely on that ambitious site builder experience of configuration overcode. So you don't necessarily need to do all of those things. And then the stuff that Dries was talking about this morning with the automatic updates and the starter kits that are gonna kind of unlock a lot of that and really enable people to do more with what's there. The one thing I'll say is one of my favorite stories right now is of a PBS station in the Northwest, KTCS. K-C-T-S-9. Okay, thank you, thank you. And the really cool thing is that they rebuilt their site on top of Drupal. They're pulling in all of the data from the main PBS, they're augmenting it, they're using machine learning to apply like Netflix style tags of Thriller or whatever it might be. That's all being done in Drupal. And then they worked with a partner to build a Roku app and a Fire TV app and an Apple TV app and those are pulling the data from there so that they can update it one place and it's feeding out. And the really great story there is that their development team is three people. They have three people at a nonprofit that has a tiny, tiny budget and they're building something that is, quite honestly, the experience is, it's very Netflix-like, it's actually pretty next level. So I think your point is very valid. This is not an easy thing to do but the fact that we have all of these resources and things that are here, it makes it a lot more possible for smaller teams and for fewer people to do much more ambitious things. But a really good point. I appreciate that. Are there any other questions or comments? Yes? Hi, I'm from the web site, that's great. So for the recording, the question was around in large organizations where you do have a Drupal presence and you have a team and sometimes people may think that Drupal is just for websites but they don't realize that you can leverage it for all of these other things. I'll start off by saying that I say all the time that the best thing about Drupal is you can do anything with it and the worst thing about Drupal is you can do anything with it, right? And that's the challenge that you have in trying to figure that out. I think internally it goes back to kind of what we were saying earlier about building that network and showing off those successes. So it can be very frustrating if you see somebody spend a lot of time and money internally to do something and you know that it could have been done faster or better or easier if they were using this common tool set, if they were using the skills and resources we already have. I think that's the place it can be challenging but finding those people internally, not just the people on those other teams but thinking strategically about who are the influencers over there, who are the trusted advisors over there and then sitting down and comparing notes. I mean like okay what have you been working on? What do you have that you're doing? What are the things I should know about great tools and things that we're using here and how we can be more effective in doing this? And here let me tell you this. I think that that's, it goes back to community and you building that internally but I think it's important to have that mindset of thinking about how this isn't just a thing to make websites, it's actually a framework that you can do a whole lot of stuff with and being an advocate and educating people is important. Yeah, I also think like bringing stories from the community has helped. Like for me as like a business user when I was learning about Drupal, it was really helpful for me to hear like these stories. One of the first ones that I heard was Pac-12 creating their mobile application and creating all of these like live streaming, this live streaming content with Drupal. They also have TV applications and I was like I can't believe that this is all Drupal. So a lot of times it's, I think for business users especially, it's helpful to hear like hey they're doing this and by the way that's supported by Drupal. And just giving those real life examples has been helpful. We've actually seen that across a lot of our customers, especially when it comes to doing employee experiences, so like employee portals. It's not something where I would say I was familiar with that use case for Drupal. And it's something that when you bring up examples of that Liberty Mutual has a great one powered by Drupal that if you bring that up to an HR team, they're like wow, like Liberty Mutual's doing that how and then it comes back to Drupal. So those examples help a lot as well. Yeah, that's a good point. For sure. Process. We are over time actually, but any other last questions before we close down? Good. Well thank you. I've actually suggested it for quite a while as well. So hopefully other people find it useful. Yeah, if you saw anything that we missed, love to hear about it too. Be awesome. Absolutely. Yeah, there's, so there's a comment. Yeah, there's a comment about where to find those use cases. As you point out you did a search, there's a lot of case studies and stuff on aque.com. You can also go to Drupal.com. A lot of people may not know that there is a Drupal.com and there are case studies that are there from across the community. So those would be some great resources to check out for sure. Yeah, I'd also check out like Pantheon and Platform SAH. Both have great Drupal use cases as well. So I'd say like any of like the platforms that's a resource that you can leverage because most of them, I mean some of them WordPress so you got to sift those out on some of the other sites but all of the aquea ones are Drupal so you don't need to talk about the aquea part. They're all powered by Drupal. Okay, well thanks everybody for taking the time and learning how to sell free software. It's been fun.