 Okay. Well, we have quite a nice amount of people that have attended today's webinar. So it's really exciting. Since this is our first webinar, really focusing on the Drupal business community and providing some education on how to help you sell, especially in the enterprise markets. I am recording today's presentation. So if you want to pass this webinar on to other people at your company or your peers at other companies, you will have that opportunity. And I wanted to just do a little housekeeping before we get started. First, if you move the slide next, Stephanie, to the housekeeping slide, you can see that we are all going to be able to ask questions today as Brad Powers speaks about his experience of selecting a CMS and how he chose Drupal for Whole Foods. And if you have a question, please use the question section of your control panel rather than the chat section. We'll be monitoring that question section and Brad will be answering questions as he goes. And also, if you're listening from the computer versus calling in, if you're having any issues hearing, make sure you're wearing a headset. And in the audio section of the control panel, select the mic and speaker option. And then after this presentation, you will see a webinar survey appear. And we just ask if you'll give us feedback because we want to, the webinar program is relatively new for the Drupal Association. And we want to make sure that we hear from you what kind of content you want to hear next. And we'll start lining those up in our series. But before we get started, before I hand this over to Brad, let me just give you a quick high view of the Drupal Association. I can see the attendee list and I see lots of names of people that are really involved with the Drupal Association, but I also see some new people. So I wanted just to give everyone a quick overview. So the Drupal Association is based in Portland, Oregon, but we serve the whole global community and we actually have staff in all sorts of places and not all just in Portland. But our mission is to foster and support the Drupal community. So basically, we take care of all the maintenance of things and helping to educate you just so you can have a growing community that's contributing to the project and just freeing you up to do what you do best, which is connecting, collaborating on the code, accelerating the project and also getting together and having a fun time, which I know is a big part of our community. And so we get funds from lots of different ways, whether it's from our Drupal cons or international conferences or our membership programs or the supporting partner program, which I can talk about at the end of today's presentation. And we have hosting partners and all these different programs generate revenue that we use to fund community programs. So one of our biggest focuses right now is hiring a Drupal.org technical team that will provide the improvements that we all need so that the site serves all of the different personas. It's really easy to navigate and find information where you can learn about Drupal and be able to get the life cycle so you're adopting and then contributing back. And so we have a lot of work happening on that front already. And then for the hosting services, we pay for that as well as the hardware for the infrastructure. And we host our Drupal cons or international events. We have some coming, we have Drupal con prod coming up at the end of this month. And then we also have grants that anyone can apply for. If you have a way to further the project and grow the community, whether it's starting a new camp or you want to do a roadshow with a couple companies to evangelize Drupal to decision makers, we have money available for you to apply to. And you just go to association.drupal.org slash grants tells you how to apply and we still have money available this year. So definitely look into that opportunity or contact me and I can tell you more. The other program that we have is called global training days. And around the world, we organize trainers to provide a free or near free training on the same day. And it's a way to grow the developer base in your local community. But if you're a training company, it's a great loss leader because once you give them say the hello Drupal type of training, then you can upsell them for your three or five day training. So if you would like to get information about that, please contact me as well. The next one will be in November. So as I mentioned, there are some things coming up. The Drupalcon Prague is September 23rd to 27th. We already have over 1700 attendees. So we're really excited about this event and we have some special opportunities here for businesses to connect at our CXO. It's a great place to talk about your business challenges and to brainstorm ways to push through them and grow in a sustainable way. We had the Drupal Global Training Days, November 15th, as I mentioned before. And if you want to find more about our activities and our events, be sure to sign up for our newsletter. You can do that by going to association.drupal.org. And right on the home page is our link for our newsletter. So with that, I'd like to introduce Brad Power, who's the IT director at Whole Foods. He and I met at Drupalcon Portland. He is the person who chose Drupal for his company. And he was very passionate about giving back to our community. So our site owners and all of your clients are very much a part of our community. And it's really great that we're trying to find ways to help them give back. Code obviously is king, but also insight into how we can grow Drupal adoption is really important. And so Brad, I just want to say thank you so much for joining us today and helping us understand your process so that we can all learn from that. And I will send over the presentation to you, Brad, so you can take over. OK, actually, I think you can just sorry about that, guys. I'm still learning the system and Stephanie. Do you mind setting up your presentation up again? I just if you just hit share screen. Sorry, buddy, who's watching. We just got this new webinar platform and I'm still learning it. Great. You just go into presentation mode. That'd be great. OK, Brad, while we're just kind of resetting that up, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to everybody on the call? Yeah, thanks. Thanks, everybody, for joining today. And as Megan mentioned, we had a chance to connect at Comportland, which was my first one. So it was really enjoyable to get exposure to the vibrant community. And it's been a lot of time trying to figure out ways that I could contribute and Whole Foods could contribute. Obviously, us setting up a booth at Drupal Con didn't make the most sense. So this was one of the ways that I hope you find is useful and look forward to getting feedback in the survey about either other topics that you'd want or maybe other people from my organization you'd like to hear from. We talked perhaps about having somebody more on the marketing side come in and speak as well. So please know this is our virgin journey and be gentle with us. A little bit about me, nine years with Whole Foods Market. I lead the tech teams here that support multiple websites, not all Drupal. We have some old hand coded stuff, some WordPress stuff. Our guest facing Whole Foods Market.com site is a Drupal site. I also support our online commerce application. And we made the decision probably about a year and a half ago to go with Drupal and our site launched August of last year, so first year anniversary just recently. And then kind of as I mentioned, I'm really excited to try to figure out new ways or ways I can bring my experience and skill set, which is not a development background to the community. So hopefully this will be useful. Guess we're ready for the next one whenever. So I kind of went through kind of what we were thinking and a few different slides and then also towards the end just some lessons learned that I hope might be valuable for all of you when you're working with your clients and partners, things that I've thought a lot about and would probably do differently or kind of what I'll expose to you more towards the end. So kind of what we were thinking, as many of you who follow technology probably realize there are several large, I'll call them paid players that seem in my opinion to be adopting customers as much as they're adopting and acquiring new technologies. And so one of the things that we wanted to do was look at, well, what are our year over year costs? And not just think about the cost that we pay in terms of maintenance and enterprise agreements, but also the cost that we pay by getting deeper and deeper with a given vendor. So as we've seen this shift, one of the, I guess, problems or concerns that we're seeing is large vendor X, not to use other people's names and cast sounds, but large vendor X, if they own you on your team member, peoplesoft, HR side, and then they go out and acquire whoever it is that you use for your front-end creative content and whoever perhaps you use for your CMS. You have less and less ability to really negotiate because they know they've got you deeper and deeper into their overall portfolio. And even when you have longer term contracts that we have some enterprise agreements with several of the larger players, you get the perception from a short-term cost benefit that this is a much better deal. But you just invested yourself into this technology for three years. And over the course of the three years, they're banking that you're going to get more and more users and have more and more software and be more and more invested. And then if they acquire a couple of other companies over that three year span, then again, it's harder and harder to negotiate because they want to bundle more and more together to give you the lower price, which again makes it harder and harder to get out. So hopefully that makes sense to everybody. That was one of the big cost part of the equation that we factored in. Another big one in just going to an open source platform, and we're seeing this even in you all probably are as well, even in paid products, is the whole idea of being able to get indemnity and how indemnity works and how trolls are becoming a real problem. And so one of the things that we looked a lot at in moving to open source because that was new for us is, well, how do we protect ourselves and what things do we need to consider in terms of costs? And so those would be things to make sure that your partners and clients are thinking about. We did find a year or so ago a few firms that do offer some kind of insurance assurances. I don't frankly know how credible they are. We didn't dig very deep into it. A couple of things that we looked at doing is making sure our legal team was heavily involved in those conversations and that we were really doing some kind of risk reward analysis and saying, okay, so in theory, this is free your software. We can't just take all that money and go put it someplace else. We have to reserve some of that money, A, to protect ourselves in case we do have some sort of patent infringement that pops up. B, we need to invest some of that money back into the community to make sure it's healthy. And so making sure that you're setting some kind of dollars aside or advising your clients to set some kind of dollars aside for any risk that might come up is important. Another thing that we've been able to do also is work with any partners that help us either build a module or recode a module that they carry some of that indemnity, basically saying, we'll stand up and court with you if module Y, somebody comes and claims that there's code in there that they wrote and they own a patent on it. So it also helps leverage that risk across multiple providers because then if they're coming after your clients, company for the money, some of that risk is deferred to a smaller company, it's not so appealing to take the smaller company with the smaller pockets to court. So a couple of ideas on indemnity there. And as Megan said, any kind of questions come up, please feel free. I'm trying to keep one eye on that and one eye on the deck. So let me know and we can entertain them or we can do them all at the end, whatever is good for everybody. So what else are we thinking? Well, obviously there's cost and there's long term assurances that you need and the other part is just how's the content, how easy is it? What can you do with it? So one of the things that we were frankly a little trapped with as the technology team is being kind of a bottleneck for our content team and working with a few other partners and having a chance to talk to other users on the technology side at DrupalCon. This was a theme that I heard with all of them. Whatever CMS like or homegrown system they were using came to the bottleneck with the technology team when it was time to deploy or push changes out. So we were definitely looking for something that gave some more creativity and flexibility to our content team to be able to publish content on their own. And as I mentioned, it frees them to do that work at the pace that the marketing team needs it to do and allows the site to be richer and more dynamic and more responsive to any kind of current trends or news or whatever is going on in the WWW there. The other thing that's obviously important is how engaging and how rich of an experience is this for our guest because for us if you all look at our site it's an information side, it's an engagement side. It's a way we want to create affinity and loyalty that aren't purchase based and are discount or coupon based about us being able to build a rich experience that hopefully gets closer and closer to mimicking what it's like in our store experience in terms of knowing who you are and being able to connect important articles or lifestyle preferences based upon either the behavior that you exhibit or the information you give about yourself. So for us this is a key area that drove Drupal to the top. We really felt that it would allow us to provide a richer social and more engaging and integrated experience for the guests. I think the marketing team in particular was attracted by I guess at a high level what they said was what they felt like was a product that started with social and learned to do content versus a few others that are content based initially and are now trying to learn how to be more social. And then kind of last point there is reitering what I said already, they really felt like it was the tool that was going to allow them to have a very focused, customized and engaged experience with an individual user. And we've taken a few steps towards that. We know we have a long way to go but we've already built in functionality that recognizes either you as a user, this is your store, these are events or venues in the store that are specific to your store and the experience that you want. Next slide please. The other thing that is always attracting is being able to do kind of what you want when you need to do it. Other partners that we work with in other areas of technology, it's difficult to get the priorities that you have on their roadmap. Sometimes it's even harder to get them to deliver what they say is on their roadmap when they say it should be delivered on their roadmap. And so we wanted to be in more of a control and driving. I mean, we really see this as an opportunity to push Drupal and support the community with initiatives that are important to our business that we think will resonate with others. And so we really appreciated the ability to work and collaborate with the community and give back to the community to drive this richer engagement. And we just struggled to do that with many of our other technical partners due to either their very long development cycles or the craziness that you have to get on some executive board to be a part of some decision-making group to craft what's going to happen. Or kind of the worst case, you get what they give you and then you have to force your business to work around whatever you're given. Another is important to us and it's not last or not at the bottom because it's the least important. It's last because I want to really hammer on this one. We have a set of core values to drive our decision-making and that's true in technology just like it is in product. But one of the things as technologists that we're excited about is it's easy and it's closer to who we are as a grocery retailer to think about creating a win-win relationship for a product vendor. If somebody brings or we find this great artisanal product, it's much easier to think about creating win-win relationships for them in terms of being able to invest in them and help them grow and help them attract more jobs and grow their business and grow their product line to expand in multiple regions. It's a little harder to think about that and how we can contribute that on the technology side. But this is one area where we felt like we really could. We could get invested in a community and give back to a technology that not only helps us grow but we think can help a lot of other businesses grow. I mean we already know about the thousands of non-profit sites around the world that are able to leverage the modules that the community delivers and we feel like this is a way on the technology side that we can stay true to those values which are really a lot harder for us to get our heads around in the technology space. Next one. Hopefully this will be kind of some meat for all of you around kind of, yeah. All right, I was going to say there are some questions about those last slides. If you go to the question section. Oh, I'm not seeing them pop up. I'm sorry. If you don't see them, I can read them out to you. Yeah, sure. Great. So the first one was about is it, this was kind of like back towards the beginning of your slides. Yeah. The question was about is it really good and does it help in selling to talk about risks? I guess there's questions about like patent trolls and do you have to deal with anything like risks in relation to patent trolls is pretty much the question. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think there is a risk there and we are experiencing that also on kind of the pseudo freeware side, thinking about what you've seen with Red Hat and a couple of other products like that where the community has created them, but then they've kind of been packetized for commercial use. So those have been real risks for us there. So as we kind of went into our first big open source adventure, we spent a lot of time with our leadership and our executive team trying to understand what we were exposing ourselves to and making sure that we protected ourselves. So I would say the size of your client, the larger your client, probably the more relevant it's going to be because then they'll, at least in our experience, the trolls realize what the pocket, you know, the net spend of that company is. And so it's much easier to go to, you know, a billion dollar, your company and say, pay us $100,000 right now and we'll settle out of court than it is a company that's only making $150,000 a year. So the bigger the company, I think the more you're exposed because the greater visibility you have and the more likely they believe you will be to settle out of court. So I think it's an important point to consider with any of your larger clients that they're protecting themselves or really what you're doing in this space is you're just setting aside money to fight them if that's your choice. Well, that's great. Thanks for that. I also just gave you, I think, visibility into the questions. Sure. Okay. The next one is it's really good. It helps in selling and talk about patent sales. Yeah. I see the other part of it. It talks about does it help in selling? I think it's part of being a good partner, right? Is that you need to make sure that your client understands and goes into this eyes wide open with all the information you have. I certainly, I'm not in the sale side. I probably wouldn't lead with it if I was you. But I think, you know, when you get in, you don't want them to have the perception that it's free and that there's no cost. And so talking to them about how it's more effective or more efficient than what it is that they're paying now will probably be the way I would recommend you phrasing that is thinking about it in terms of, you know, you're paying X for whatever tool you use now. This tool is going to be more less expensive for you year over year, but there are a few other costs that you want to make sure you're considering. I think it would help you have a better longer term relationship with whoever you work with. Next one. Yes, fat controlling is a risk and I just covered that one with the problem that we have. So that's a good point as well. Is the ability, the next one, has the ability to quickly put content messages to your customers, increased your level of ideas as it innovated your work? I think it's definitely allowed us to be more engaging with the guests. And I use the example about the stores. We didn't have the store specific profiles of the way we do now. So one of the ways that we've been able to do that is we actually have, I think we're up to 359 stores today or something like that. So we have a content administrator at each store that's able to publish the content that's relevant to their store. So I think what that's trying to do is help us connect again in a digital space the same way we do at a store level. But the question about it increasing our level of ideas, that's a good one. We are looking at doing some other explorations. I think Starbucks has a good program in place. I think Pepsi has another good model for how you can use your community to innovate. So right now I'd say that's happening more in an analog mode, more the comments that are received at the stores that are sometimes digital or sometimes handwritten. And as those get to the marketing team and funnel up, there's a lot of ability in our company for great ideas and decision making to come up through the company versus top down in a more traditional model. So hopefully it'll evolve and create a greater transparency and a greater engagement with our guests which will lead to the question that Benjamin is. The next one, some clients used to tell me when I give them the budget about their requirement it's too expensive to be an open source. How can I react? I mean there are costs there and I guess they have to they have to weigh it across their organization. So the point that I was making earlier about you can't look at a specific item as the only cost if you use seven different products from the same vendor. You have to look at it. I recommend that you help them look at it across the portfolio and say well yeah it's great because they gave you this lower price but are you really happy with the seven different things that you're getting and if you add an eight thing from that same vendor how easy is it for you to get rid of any one of those things? Because again that's the model that we're seeing more with the partners we deal with is they're putting lots of pieces together to give you a lower cost because they're creating more barriers to exit. And so I think that that's a way to help them realize that there are other costs. And then I think there's probably also part of it too if in one of the things I'll talk about when what we learn is you know if they're planning on paying somebody to do all of the development work themselves maybe they perceive that cost to be higher than what their internal team is able to do and that's a little retooling. So if I didn't get to everything that you wanted there Alexandra please reply back. I think that's a next one. So what do we learn? The development team here is changing from current technology to Drupal obviously so my team didn't have a lot of exposure to Drupal. So one of the things that we talked about and I would do a better job of moving forward is getting involved in the community early and recommending and getting active in your local meetups Drupal camps whatever way you can get involved and learn and share. Work with a partner to hold some multiple week Drupal development training. I think that Drupalized me and some of those other sources are great. I think that that having a deeper more focused introduction to the tool and the methodology and framework is very important. One of the things that I would think about doing differently that I didn't do the first time was naturally or at least for me taking the existing team and having them continue to focus on the site because they know it the best and leveraging more the partner that you use to do the coding and build the Drupal site. I would actually challenge your clients to think to do the opposite. Find somebody to come on and build and maintain your existing site for you so that you whatever team you imagine is going to be the long-term team is focused heavily with the partner building the site so that they can more easily maintain it. That might be what you guys already recommend that wasn't what we did and something I would do differently. And if at all possible be sure that you bring in somebody on your team that has a significant amount of experience. I think a partner is great and they can definitely bridge the gap but having somebody that has a stronger experience and a stronger track record is going to help your team grow and help your team feel more in control of their destiny. And I've had a couple of other questions pop up. What kind of content do we hold or would we like it to hold? I mean I think that the content that Drupal is able to hold now or our CMS system to hold is more than adequate for our needs. I think what we're trying to do is again more specifically target that content. So thinking about it that way it's associating more attributes with the content and then as you're building the relationship with your guest and asking them questions more about what their affinity is, their lifestyle preference using those attributes to surface content that's more and more relevant for them. So be going beyond the store and understanding that you are trying to reduce salt in your diet or you're gluten free and beginning to expose blog articles that are about that or store events that are about that. The same way you would in a relationship you might have with somebody in the store what we're really looking to do. The next question I have is what role did marketing play in the evaluation and how did you work together with them during the process? We partnered on it so we came up with a list of evaluation criteria that was a mix of marketing needs and technology needs and kind of some company business objectives. And then we vetted different platforms and also we used that selection criteria in determining our partner to help us build the site. So I'd say it was an even share and how we made the decision and the number of people that were a part of the decision-making process. So hopefully that answers your question, Joe. Oh, the next question I have is were there things that made you think Drupal wasn't the option to go forward with and how would an account rep best put your mind at ease? I think that coming into it completely new as an organization and not being exposed to Drupal it's certainly just the fear of the unknown. How can this community and this open source platform compete with the likes of Oracle or Microsoft or these companies that you have billions of dollars to build the platform? How will it scale? You know, the uncertainty about all this code being contributed from people and not having any visibility really to where they got that code from going back to the indemnity question. So I think those are definitely things that made us question early if Drupal was the right option. I think that, you know, again being a good partner you're able to help your clients go through those questions one at a time, look around obviously exposing them to some of the other very large fortune 100 companies if not 500 companies that are on this platform. You know, that's another thing I think that would be powerful to do is figure out a way to help your client engage with other clients their size perhaps leveraging connections at Drupal org. I'm not exactly sure how that would work but some way to give them the confidence. I do that with our partner where other clients that are looking to move to Drupal we have, you know, conversations like this so to help them understand the decision making that went through. Okay, so going from the dev team I think that's all the questions for now. The hosting. So, you know, depending on how you decide to do this, I'm guessing most of your clients are going to try to move everything they have from one place to a new place. So if you have a mix of hosting partners which we do, we have some stuff at Amazon and some stuff at Rackspace. Making sure that you involve them early on in the architecture it'll eliminate any longer term potential for finger pointing and obviously will help the combined environments work the best way they can together. For us it wasn't just a multi-phase approach of what we want to move this thing first into the Drupal stack and then we'll add this thing later. There are some components that we'll never move like a single social sign-on tool that we already have a rating system that we would be harder for us to port out even if Drupal could do just as good a job if not better to port it out and port all the content and all the ratings and all of the users out. So there'll be some things that will live or need to live in harmony, need to live in harmony long-term. So figuring out how to work those integrations and make sure that the partners are involved early is another decision I'd make. And kind of the last area there that's just real quick is any new questions coming in. Was there a specific of topic training that your developers who had a little exposure to Drupal really engaged with and began to understand the power of platform? I don't think there was a specific one and for me that's kind of my miss is that I probably would have worked with a partner to do some of the courses that Megan outlined earlier in the session. An intro to Hello to Drupal followed up by a Drupal focus training organization that would do a week or two and I hope I'll say this in a way that's meaningful to all of you but as a non developer my perception is that there's a framework that you need to work within that's not the same kind of thing that you might do if you were just a great PHP developer for example. And so making sure that they understand the framework that you work within and how I think also to engage in the community and to look for modules to help solve problems. Some of those things are different and how you would do that then just googling a code fix for example. And so I think a little more discipline up front into how to get involved in the community how to leverage the framework would be things I would do differently. But I don't have a specific one because I messed up and didn't do that. Megan asked a question back to the point I made is would you guys all think that there's a value in the association facilitating these kinds of intros where if you needed help to talk to a larger company on behalf of your client or put your client together with I don't know how big they could get but you guys all know Time Warner, New York Stock could change White House being able to introduce them and have some kinds of conversation. So she's asking a question if you all think that would be valuable. So if you do I guess we should do it right away to make it happen. Yeah we can definitely do that. In the final areas we've talked about it. Go ahead, shoot. Oh sorry I was going to say we can certainly do that and even at DrupalCon Austin next year we're looking to have a site owner track so Brad and his peers can come together and get content and network and just learn how to expand Drupal adoption and so we're definitely looking to make these touch points happen in the community but feel free to reach out and let me know what would work best for you and what your needs are because we're always evolving. Great. The last areas around the overall Drupal community I've touched on it a few times but I've been really focused on developers. One of the things that I would want to do differently is get my whole team involved early. Make sure that the analysts understand the roles that they can play in terms of helping write a requirement or perform a test on an existing module making sure that the marketers understand the ecosystem and how it works together and how by choosing to be involved you build the community which provides good things out but also opens up your connections and opportunity to bring good things in that others are doing and that really just everybody can help. Everybody can help if we can find what it is that you're passionate about which hopefully you guys feel like something like what I'm doing today is because I was passionate about trying to figure out how to help. I was probably high on Drupal Comp Portland when I met Megan and I really wanted to figure out a way because the energy I felt that was something I wanted to participate in and it just wasn't clear to me and so that would be something that I would push my team stronger to do and something where we're definitely getting better at. And then yeah just build awareness for the community so just got another question what role the marketing play in the evaluation and how do you I think that might be a duplicate. Sorry I think I got that one just but yeah just it was a partnership between us to evaluate the software and that's how we work together in building the selection criteria. A couple of other points that I think are super relevant as you are probably all experiencing you know the demand for the talent and the price that the talent can demand is only going up as there's more demand for this product. So I think it's important to let and make sure your clients know that and that they're thinking about that. They have some market analysis to understand what the what the rate is if they choose to convert somebody knowing that they're going to build a lot into this person and that could make them more marketable. I think also figuring out ways to to grow your own talent. So either working with the local community college or college to make sure that they're offering some courseware that's going to provide the pipeline. Another program that I'll throw out that I'm trying to figure out how to do is we have a lot of veterans returning to the United States and I'm in the middle of trying to develop some curriculum that would give them some introduction to web technologies particularly some focus on Drupal and to try to provide internships for them. So that you need to be creative as this as the demand for this product continues to grow so that you can bring in and build your own quality team. So thinking about that is an important component that the leadership might not be thinking about but the technology team it whoever you're working with needs to be thinking about and just figuring out how to partnership with other firms to host workshops is another idea we've been doing here in Austin. Work with colleges to to build the curriculum and just figure out how to make it more accessible to a younger generation so that we continue to build that pipeline. So the question that just came in is presumably we're all in Drupal to win it. Can we elaborate on what other CMSs you looked at and that you're evaluating are there any items that Drupal's competitors did better out in your mind. Certainly looked into Adobe WordPress expression engine several other products I mean there's some compelling tie-ins you know with what what Adobe is doing with how you can get licensing that you can share. I think they just had an announcement last week that their content tools are now integrated into a platform that will allow them to create more responsive websites natively. So I think that there are some things that are attractive there that you know you want to look at when you say what are the tools that my developer currently uses today. What's kind of the the fewest changes or the fewest barriers so if they're using a different code repository that might be something to consider on the development side you know is there an easy integration with their project management tools we haven't really talked about that at all but look you know helping guide them on that if they're you know big.net shop that's going to be huge change thinking about moving from TFS to to Jira or Basecamp or whatever you might you know help them recommend whatever code repositories they're using and how they push and deploy would be different and similarly on the content side what tools are they using to create and how easy is it for them to integrate with a given platform are definitely things that we considered and and and caused frankly a few products to rise a little bit higher than Drupal but I think again when you take a step back as a business and look at okay well what's our overall investment in Adobe and who owns Adobe and what are they doing what else do we have with them and and then again I don't want to lose sight that what we really liked a lot about this is the ability to create the unique experience that we know we want and what tools we're going to give us the the most capability to do that at a pace that's right for us and not wait on a release cycle so those are some of the the things that caused competitors that might have risen in one or two areas to to to lose overall so hopefully that got you close to what you wanted there Dave so the next question is what if someone in my position need to get up to speed about Drupal 8 and how can partners and vendors best approach clients to start the Drupal 8 conversation um I think that the presentation that the Dries did and then I got to see the gentleman from symphony speak at DrupalCon gives me a strong insight into what it can do I think the timeline is going to be different depending upon the size of your client maybe the the level of risk that they accept like I would not think that Drupal 8 would be right for us for probably two years and partly that's because I've only been on Drupal 7 platform for one year so doing a major site redesign you know you need to get some return on investment before you can do it secondly we don't want to be a technology company an early adopter so we'd rather we and and as they say kind of ride the wave let some others go before us and start to figure out kind of what's best to breed that we can adopt and the third thing is you know just make sure that it's make sure that it's a mature product so I would want to you know want to know again if the size of the company what's their risk for trying something new so I think exposing them to that there's a path there and exposing them to in my small development mind how much more flexible and API driven it's going to be are things that are exciting to us because it lets me consider how I can change back end and integration points out with with a little bit more ease is kind of some high level things I took away with it the partnership with Symphony and a stronger framework is interesting as well but for me it's a little early to to think about building a side up based upon the level investment we have and and where I see it isn't evolving in the marketplace the next one is looking to switch to CMS how can I do push up finds an account who's looking to switch their CMS how can a shop help them with that evaluation and best pitch triple in their business well hopefully some of the things I've said today will give you some insight I think that it's really looking at what their needs are and this is something I try to focus on going back to the win-win thing I'm not saying this should be your answer but sometimes it's okay letting the partner know that this isn't the right time or this isn't the right product for you and just being a being a good partner I think when they have a compelling interest you know selling the story selling the points that that we had today and making sure they understand the full cost so a lot of what your question is Joe's is kind of what I'm trying to do today is to give some insight into what else it is that that we're evaluating on and making sure that their overall team is involved I think if if you if you get to technology focused and don't involve the marketing team then that's going to be really disruptive for them if you only involve the marketing team and not the technology team and that's either going to be disruptive to the technology team or or you look at the option of maybe outsourcing the technological component with somebody who can post it and manage it for them or a long-term relationship with you as the partner to to host it deploy for them and those kinds of things but it kind of depends on I guess what they're trying to get out of it another question in how high up the company did the final CMS decision go I involved our C level team so for us that's the highest level in technology and marketing so they were two drivers in part of probably the final five to seven people that made that made the final decision so I think that they were they were heavily engaged in the next question the next question is what considerations have you given to integrated commerce packages when the Drupal platform Uber car commerce etc I say we've been looking hard at it we have a current commerce provider one of the things that we have to think about and I would be another point to advise your clients in regards to commerce in general is just what the PCI implications are with it and for us tax is an important and complicated thing you'd be surprised how many different legislative entities want to tax on if the water is bubbly and flavored versus flat so there's a kind of a complicated product hierarchy there so those are some some things that that we're looking to to move towards I think where we'll evolve over time is is is connecting closer to our point of sale and and not because we don't think that the Drupal commerce is a platform that can be successful it's because a lot of what ours is about is what product do we have in the store at this time that you might want and we need to know that directly from the point of sale and then we're getting back to kind of the taxing and the credit card transactions I'd say that we want to continue to use Drupal as our content and experience front end but we'll probably plug in different integration points based upon more of the supply chain and the fulfillment that we that we already have investment in okay I think that's it for the questions for now so going back to I think my last one here and that's good we've got a few minutes still training you know there's never enough time but you you've got to try and you've got to push that I think that's another I would do something different as we talked about with the developers but it's also thinking about how you can come be creative with training with with everybody that's going to use the product because you know change is always hard so if you don't practice a lot then on day one it's a huge amount of change and it's very disruptive so some options that I hope you find are useful that that I would do differently is think about building and standing up some internal marketing sites or some internal maybe it's a project site some way that it lets your client have a chance to practice with the tool in a way that's not production right a way that you can allow them to push content go through the process edit stuff have your development team build modules deploy modules so that's hopefully an idea that you'll find valuable and something that I wish we had done differently is is again standing up some kind of internal site or sites that lets everybody practice and play with it so they can learn how to do their job and learn some of the problems and complications that that they don't even tell you that they're doing every day until you go live and then you find out of oh my god I do it this way we never told me that as they practice through it they'll realize it so I don't have any other questions coming in but we have I think another 10 minutes or so see if anything pops up oh Mike is the question around sea level decision maker sorry CXO, CIO, CMO it's a term we use internally to kind of decide but we have our C team which in the case of this decision making was our CIO or CTO and our CMO our chief marketing officer and then our E team is kind of the next level now good question next question is did they require a demo on the use of Drupal I think yeah that's definitely part of our evaluation to make a big investment like we did and to be able to figure out ways that other companies are using it so one of the things that we worked with our partner on was getting some non-competes in place so that we could go sit down with other shops that use it talk to their marketing team over a day or two visit sometimes how's this product working what do you think so far how long have you been using it what's your strategies helping you achieve your strategy so I think some site visits again dependent on the size of your client and how much investment they're going to make in this all those kinds of things are more and more important so they didn't ask to see a demo from the standpoint of take me to Drupalize me show me how a module works it was more let's sit down with another business our peer group that's converted and talk to them about what the experience has been like and how happy they are what challenges they've had so we did that with a few different few different colleagues with a few different plat different platforms to help in the evaluation thanks max appreciate that next one was what was the biggest negative of Drupal and how did you overcome the objection yeah I mean going back to some of the points earlier I don't know that there were there were negatives it's just you know it's the normal human behavior of fear of change and fear of the unknown and what is the Drupal thing and so I think it's really exposing to your clients how I feel and just the last couple of years maybe five years you've seen this seismic shift from nonprofits and colleges and universities using it in really cool and exciting ways to to a to a big enterprise utilization and creating awareness for them that yeah we realize this is a big decision and we just want to reinforce with you that there are many other big businesses that use this and obviously it's really compelling if they're in a similar market space right if they're you know if they're heavy into advertisement show them what the Time Warner Suites doing and some of the other big players if they're really social you know there's some great nonprofit sites that are out there that do great things and obviously I look to you know to the White House is a huge example of something that scales something that has tons of volume has a lot of interactivity so finding finding examples for them that are who they aspire to be or who who they want to be a what the product they want to have in the marketplace I think really helps overcome any fear or concern they have around it being a viable long-term platform questions are coming in well now partners um Dave asks if I'm comfortable talking about the Drupal partners we selected sure yeah I mean I think that when we say Drupal there's you know there's there's a there's kind of a content component there's a development component and there's a hosting component and we we explored a few different players we had some great work done with the VML and initially went with Aquia for for our hosting and managed services again we knew it was a technology we weren't familiar with and we were concerned that our internal team would be able to scale and understand the technology in a way that would support our website volume so we've created a partnership with Aquia to help us with that next part of your question is once you decided on Drupal what was the vendor partner selection process like I think it was kind of it was hand in hand as we were looking at the different CMS systems that we wanted to evaluate we were also looking at who's effective and who has a strong track record for content creative and development in these areas and so I'd say there were lots of conversations and discussions where when we would meet with other companies or we would meet with you know an agency they would be talking about the different technologies with us so it wasn't really a separated discussion for us it was it was commingled a lot Tom asked Megan if these slides are available yes I think Megan's recording all this so the slides will be available as well as all of the question and answer and then Jeff wanted to know what else what else we looked at my memory is the ones that I mentioned WordPress expression is Adobe and we were a WordPress site before so that'd be another one that we included in the evaluation so I guess that's five when you started looking for information about Drupal on the web papers, presentation, etc how did you find that experience and what would have made it easier and better I think I think our partner guided this a lot in that like I can remember earlier trying to hire Drupal and getting guidance from AQUI on where to post jobs how I needed to be active in the community and have a profile to have any kind of credibility and attract talent so I think that's another great thing that you guys can help the companies with is how to get involved and where to look for partners and if you only do development having a referral for a creative side that you can work collaboratively with are always strong I think naturally Drupal.org is another great site for us to find and be active in the community and find the resources I think when it got down to wanting to talk to other companies we are fortunate in that if we make calls or people know people at other companies they're always open to us having conversations especially if they're not a competitor so we can get in the door of other companies and have those kinds of conversations so when it came to finding those other companies that wasn't a resource I did on the web it was more networking within my own company of who knows who here and obviously probably the same way you guys do just googling anyone that's made an announcement about their sites on Drupal who are they what do they do is their business like ours but I'd say my partner and the Drupal site were probably the two biggest sources of information well making it easier Joe it'd be easier if somebody did it all for me you know I mean if I could go to Gartner or Forester which you know you can and that'd be another good resource for your partners is looking at kind of the magic quadrant is the Gartner phrase right if those clients already have access to those resources they're great because you can look at CMS and see how it's evaluated using that criteria and oftentimes you can get from those articles other companies that are using it and if they're part of the Gartner group oftentimes they'll provide information back about what their experience has been so those would be two other resources that I didn't mention that hopefully will help you next question is this a good one I haven't thought about this let me give you a second thought the do you see only big agencies getting the contracts in the enterprise field or do you see chances for small agencies and freelancers I think it's for me it's matching the right company and skills to be successful with the project so I don't naturally gravitate towards a big company I try and research the company to understand what you're good at what is your area of expertise and nobody should advertise that they're good at everything so we again trying to find win-win relationships we want to put partners in we want to put partners in positions so everyone is going to be successful so for me it's a lot about the engagement and what I want to get out of it so we have used some big shops like VML and Aquia we're also working with a with a local shop that hopefully we'll be able to create some exciting news on soon and it's a five person team so I think that we try to put people in position to be successful so for me it doesn't matter I would say that you know that's probably a question that you want to know from your partner because they may be more apprehensive about a smaller shop but if you really focus on letting people do what they're good at there's a lot of one, two, five-man shops out there that can do some great stuff next question was how can we measure performance or tune with Drupal site Krishna that's something that I cannot help you answer I will admit that that's a big part of what I use Aquia for so I'm not familiar with what tools would be out there Megan, can we get Krishna a resource for tuning and performance with Drupal sites? Yeah Krishna I'll follow up directly and point you to some resources all right more questions nothing else is popping up well Brad this was really a really thorough presentation and I think it's clear that it really resonated with everyone because we had some really strong questions and answers and hopefully this will be kind of the start of all the knowledge sharing for our Drupal businesses you talked about maybe getting your CMO on here too to kind of give his his or her perspective of what that evaluation process looked like and and how to sell it to a CMO because that's a whole another kind of conversation right? Yes yeah well that's great well I if anyone has any more questions feel free to email them to me at Megan at Association dot Drupal dot org and I'm happy to send them over to you Brad if you don't mind yeah that'd be great and then what we could do is answer them through a blog post and get them out to everybody that way yeah yeah and definitely fill out the survey and other ideas you have again I don't want this to be a one-time shot for me so if there's other topics that I can help address I'd love to do that or I can engage other team members here to bring other areas of the business to talk to you and answer questions that you have so please let us know that's great and if there's other topics that anyone wants to hear about to help your business whether it's around talent acquisition or expanding sales and marketing I see there's a certain someone here with an expertise in marketing automation and topics like that we just want to hear all the different ways that we can help you and we'll find speakers like Brad to present on that so let us know in the survey but in the meantime let me just do my little plug of some things coming up again we've got DrupalCon Prague at the end of the month from the 23rd to the 27th of September and again you'll see some changes of our Drupalcons in 2014 DrupalCon Austin we're going to have a track just for site owners and you'll see some more news about that so sign up for our newsletter to follow this but this is a great time to bring your clients to DrupalCon we're going to have content to help them understand how to use Drupal even more opportunities and network with your peers to see what they're doing with Drupal it's a really great way to deepen your footprint in these accounts and again if you have a training component of your company or your person business then you should participate in Drupal Global Training Days it's a great way to grow your local community but it's also a great way to get leads to upsell them on other training programs that you have so just moving on to the next slide if you like today's content and the work that the Drupal Association is doing I encourage you to become an individual member which is 30 US dollars or about 22 euros or if you're a company and you want to give back you can become an organization member there's a whole range of price points there which starts at 200 dollars US or 73 euro and if you would like to give back to the community and get even more benefits if you go to the next slide you can become a supporting partner and this is for Drupal businesses who want to get more visibility into the community and to really show their thought leadership and they can do that through webinars through blog posts information in our newsletter also we have benefits that help you secure talent through job boards we're going to be creating a job board on Drupal.org next year you'll get some opportunities to post there and you'll get some savings so you can go to DrupalCon and sponsor and get discounts and you can also get a free pass to our CXO event at all of the DrupalCon which is a great networking mentoring program for Drupal business leaders and there's a lot more that comes with these programs but there's different tiers so you can pick the one that's right for you but we certainly hope you'll consider this opportunity and in the survey you can let us know if you'd like more information or if you'd like someone to contact you about it and just so you know if you go to the next slide the funds from this program is funneled to improvingdrupal.org we are hiring a technical team that will cost to the tune of about half a million dollars and that's being supported by our partner programs and the technical team right now that we have in place is almost an upgrading Drupal.org to Drupal 7 which once that's done then we can make some significant changes that's really going to make it easier for developers to collaborate and site builders to come in and select modules and know why they should choose this one over that one and it's just going to help accelerate the program and on board new community members so they can find out how to engage with the community how to use the project and how to contribute back so lots of improvements come in because of our supporting partners and if you go to the link below you can learn more about the program but also find out who some of our partners are we have several here on the call today and we're just very thankful for what they're contributing and giving back so with that I also want to thank Brad Power for speaking today and sharing your knowledge I think this is the kind of insight we really need in order to grow our business and expand Drupal into the enterprise because we're all here just to grow Drupal's adoption and also to find out how we can accelerate the project to really meet your needs so thank you very much for your time and your thoughtfulness and the content you've provided thanks I enjoyed it hope everybody else found it useful great okay well we have a lot of people saying thank you in the presentation and if there's any questions unanswered I will pull them all together send them to Brad and we will do a blog post out and you we also recorded today so everyone here will receive an email with a link to the recording okay so with that stay tuned for our next webinars that will will be announcing shortly and okay and thanks Brad I'm going to close this out thanks have a great day everybody thank you bye