 Hey everyone. Thanks for joining me today. Can you guys all hear me? Does that sound good in the back? All right, good. All right, I'll start my timer. So it's one o'clock, so let's get started. This session is competing with Giants. How to win with Drupal vs. Proprietary Alternatives. My name's Brian House. I'm Vice President of Product Marketing at Acquia. How many people get e-mail from me? Excellent. You know how it is. So, objectives for this session. So what I'm going to do is talk a little bit about my experience personally and what we're seeing at Acquia and in general about the market opportunity for Drupal. Certainly the competitive landscape for Drupal and where we're seeing Drupal compete and how it competes against some of the proprietary vendors in the market. The analysts perceive how the gardeners, foresters, real story groups of the world perceive Drupal in comparison to some of these other vendors and how you can think about positioning Drupal to win. One of the things that we see day in and day out at Acquia when we're talking to large organizations that are considering Drupal is we as the vendor working with our partners can talk a lot about Drupal but when an organization makes a big bet on Drupal it's because there's internal champions that can articulate the story, they can tell them why Drupal is a better solution for their organization as compared to whatever those alternatives may be. And so a lot of what this we do day in and day out is training people within our customers, our prospects how to tell the Drupal story, how to position it with procurement, how to position it with their business stakeholders if they're on the IT side, or how to sell it to IT who's maybe resistant to open source or other pieces that make Drupal. And then the last thing I'll wrap on today is how you can help. What's critical in this process of growing Drupal's market share, growing the opportunity for Drupal in winning is to share stories, to talk to the analysts, to tell your story loudly. That's probably the biggest driver of success and we've seen it sort of when peers share with one another and so I'll have some ways that you can help and hopefully that'll inspire you to reach out to us or reach out to other folks directly. So how many of you would consider yourselves enterprise users of Drupal? Excellent, excellent. So you guys probably see all this day firsthand and know from firsthand experience. The landscape is definitely shifting as Drupal enters the enterprise. Perception in many ways is reality. This is a quote we came across from an Adobe lead sales engineer. And so thinking about how other vendors position themselves against Drupal is really, really critical. The proprietary vendors of the world love to use FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt to position against us. They love to put us in boxes, you know, small sites, you know, open source, not ready for prime time, not ready for the enterprise. And they'll be very explicit about that when they talk amongst themselves and certainly when they talk to their prospects. And so providing the ammunition to you and see your counterparts with inside your organization is critical to combat this FUD. So when I think about the enterprise and sort of the perspective I'm using for this presentation, it's thinking about the global 10,000, which actually consists of about 14,000 businesses according to IDC, but global 10,000 is a nice rank to it. But these are organizations that have more than 2,500 employees and have greater than $500 million in revenue. And what we see here is that when you're talking to organizations like this, they have well-defined procurement processes. They understand how to purchase technology, they purchase it a lot. There's a lot of stakeholders and decision influencers that you go through. And so they've got this down pretty well down pat. Now there's typically technical stakeholders and this group changes, but it's the CIO and the CTO are concerned about business transformation and sort of where do they lead their business to effectively achieve three things, improve top-line growth, reduce costs, or improve customer satisfaction. And then the people that are operating and using the system on a day-to-day basis, the architects, sysadmins, the developers, dev ops teams. You know, on the flip side, there's the business stakeholders. It's the CMO, the VP of marketing that own the websites, are responsible for the website and making the website work for their business. It's the VP of digital or e-marketing with an organization, as well as their department heads. And then finally, the people that use the system every day. You know, we have countless situations when we're bringing Drupal to a large organization where we've got the technical side of the house. They understand the architecture. They like what it does. They're bought off on it. And then we go over to the marketing department. The people that are going to use the system on a day-to-day basis. And they throw up all over Drupal. And they say, hey, I saw this sexy demo from, you know, insert your proprietary CMS system here. And I want that to look like that. That looks really cool. That looks really easy. And so they can derail a process based on the demo. There's a bof tomorrow about marketing Drupal, and this is a big piece of it. One of the things we need is a sexy demo. We've seen the flip side happen too, right, where you sell it into marketing. You talk about social publishing and all the things that Drupal can do. And then you take it over to the IT. And IT comes in and they don't know the lamp stack. They're not ready for open source technologies. They're resistant because it's a change to how they do business. And we all know change is very, very difficult to manage. And so, you know, you need to address both of these audiences when you're talking to sell Drupal, particularly in an enterprise environment because people aren't empowered, in many cases, to make these decisions sort of on a one-off basis. But regardless of the department, you know, and who the stakeholders are at the table during this process, you know, what we find is that what they're trying to accomplish, their objectives are oftentimes very, very much aligned. They want to publish and organize rich content. They want to do it quickly. They want to get more out of their site. They want to have more social experiences to their site. Increasingly, they want to have more mobile experiences and have multi-channel publishing to create these rich experiences and push them out to multiple devices. More and more, they have managed collections of sites. It's not one or 10 sites. How many people here have more than 10 Drupal sites that they manage in their organization? Thank you. My point is that this is becoming a real challenge and there's great opportunities for Drupal, but this is, you know, what organizations are trying to do. And then they need help building communities to support ad hoc business activities. And so Drupal provides a nice flexible environment to do that. And so, you know, increasing what we're seeing is how they're looking for solutions that bridge the gap between what marketing is trying to accomplish, creating great experiences, creating personalized experiences for visitors, managing digital assets and making more, put their content to work, and then managing and measuring and tracking that with IT objectives, which is, you know, manage costs, manage the infrastructure, create content distribution so that way you can sort of get a standardized platform and get some benefits of leverage and scale when this thing they build so that way when you manage hundreds, tens, or hundreds of sites, you can do so cost-effectively and then be able to integrate that into your existing infrastructure. There's lots of data systems, lots of sources that you need to tie to SSO, security systems, certainly CRM and marketing automation systems are top of mind with everybody. So, you know, the nice piece is that, you know, how do you position Drupal to help bridge this gap rather than reinforce the differences between these two? And so when we talk to organizations, and I'll talk about some of this in some of the case studies at the end, they only look like this. They've got lots of disconnected sites, and more likely, they have lots of disconnected sites and lots of different technologies powering their content on those sites. We talked to a large pharmaceutical company recently. They have 600 websites and they estimated they had 60 CMSs that they were managing somewhere in the world. You know, so internal teams, local teams, outside resources. I mean, this is incredible complexity for them as an organization and what that translates into is costs and slow, you know, they're slows down their delivery to their business and they're not able to deliver consistent experiences to the business as a result because they don't know who owns the technology, do they have the resources in that area to serve that business needs. And so what we're looking, you know, the challenge here is they see tremendous duplication of content and duplication of effort amongst their editorial teams that are trying to manage content across these. They've got lots of information in disparate sources. They can't connect all that. They can't take advantage of all these great knowledge assets, content assets that exist in the organization because it's hard to push across these technologies. It's impossible to report on this. And what they find is, yeah, there's maybe areas where we're doing really, really well, but they can't make it scale. They can't replicate this. This is one of the things we're hearing over and over again is I want to experiment in my organization. I want to apply agile methods to our web properties because I know I have a lot of them. I want to try things, test, iterate on it, and then when it works, then roll it out across the organization. You can't do that when every technology underpinning this is different. And so, you know, you don't have any way to scale and repeat what works across your infrastructure. And so what we're increasingly hearing is what the business wants is something like this. They want a central repository. This could be one doc route. This could be many code bases. Boy, they can have content services model across multiple sites. They can reuse content across multiple sites. They also now can get to multi-channel delivery, so they can take those nodes and push them out to mobile devices. They can push them out to their marketing automation system to push to marketing campaigns. They can push them out to social channels and re-get some scale and leverage across this. And so, you know, there's a new term we'll talk about here in a minute called web experience management or web engagement management. There's lots of ways to describe it. There's a central infrastructure that powers across many of your web properties. You know, and from an IT perspective, what we hear time and time again is this is the challenge. We have tens, if not hundreds, of websites. I want to be able to get some benefit and scale. You know, one of our customers is an organization, Florida Hospital. They have 150 websites behind the firewall. And they have some 80 websites outside the firewall. And so, one of the benefits they saw when standardizing on Drupal was that they can get leverage from their theming and their design teams, from their development organizations, from their CIS admins and the DevOps teams that run the infrastructure. So now, they can deliver websites as a service. So this is great for the IT organization. They can reduce costs. They can replicate best practices. They can create process to roll out sites very, very quickly and scale and still affect their bottom line. So now what they want to do is they can access and be able to make that available across multiple channels. So it's not just the website, but it's actually being able to create sites that work in mobile that communicate beyond just the properties that they drive their traffic to. Now, what we're seeing is Drupal's uniquely positioned to do this and do this very well. Because Drupal addresses the broadest range of needs for site creation in the market. So this scale is the scale of the site. How much traffic? How does it peak on the vertical access versus the complexity and longevity of the site? How many systems are you integrating it with? How much, you know, custom development work do you need to meet your goals? And, you know, there's lots of alternatives and we'll talk about them that can do the corporate site really well or can do very, very sophisticated editorial publishing very well and you can create very sophisticated workflows. But you know what, to build a marketing site in those, very, very difficult to do. And when you need a marketing site next week, it's impossible to do. And so that's when they go outside and they hire an agency to bring in an external technology. That's when they go and experiment with something sort of off the grid from IT or from sort of where the systems teams manage. Because they can't get it done either way. You know, we have an organization that we talk to. They needed mobile sites for some of their business stakeholders for promotional campaigns. And their core system was an Oracle fat wire system. And so the business come in and said, hey, you know, I need a mobile site for this promotional campaign, but we're running it in two weeks. Can you do it? And you're like, I'll have to do a mobile site and a fat wire is going to take us two months. Can you wait two months? Can you hold your campaign? Well, of course not. They can't hold their campaign. So then this is where, this is one of the ways that Drupal enters the organization. They're like, well, we can do it in Drupal in two weeks. Do you have any problem if we do it in Drupal? No, we don't have a problem with that. Guess what, now they've got a Drupal site. And they've got it in mobile site. And they're like, hey, that's really great because we have three more of those. So this is one of the things that Drupal is really, really well suited for. And the organizations that are open-minded about how they approach their web technologies and are embracing open source, that's the things that they see. This agility and time to market becomes critical, but they're not sacrificing the web application framework to do the larger sites. They know that they can still address some of their more complex requirements with this. And so for many it's not simply a choice between open source options. This is a map I like to show from the real story group. This is one of the analyst firms that covers the market. We're in a pretty complicated space as it turns out. There's a lot of vendors in the content management space in one form or another. And so Drupal is down here at the bottom, in the bottom right left-hand corner. But you see this, when they think about content technologies, they think about documents and records, web content management, portals, collaboration and social software. And then SharePoint all together. So, you know, it's hard to break through in this ecosystem. But one of the things that's nice about Drupal is it meets many of these different capabilities. But because it's an application framework and it's an open platform, in the areas that it's not going to excel, you're not going to use Drupal to do document management. You're not going to use Drupal to use records management. You can integrate with a system to do that. You can use CMIS, you can use something like Canopy or Fresco. So it gives you a lot more flexibility when you're in this map. So you don't have this technology sprawl, if you will. Now when we think about the opportunity here, so there's lots of vendors, we also look at the opportunity, how big is this market? So when we think about where Drupal plays and sort of the roles it fits, it crosses the lines in a couple of different places. But it certainly plays in the web WCM, CMS market, a $2 billion market in 2014. It plays in the social software market. Lots of people are doing community websites with this. External communities, developer communities, it competes with the jives of the world. That's an over-billion-dollar market. And then certainly cloud-based, cloud-delivered pieces. And what's not represented here is commerce. You know, with Drupal, commerce is a whole other, much bigger market. And as Dries talked about yesterday in his keynote, you know, this doesn't really capture mobile either. It's really in there because you're using these technologies but really doesn't capture the real opportunity and the spend around this category. So this is an attractive market. This is growing. This is the web contents, the fastest growing portion of the overall content technologies market. And so it attracts attention. So what I mentioned before, that the landscape is changing fast and open source really isn't the only option anymore. You know, open source, we talked in Dries' keynote video, we heard from people like the CTO of Maxim magazine and others that open sources reach parity if not surpassing some of the proprietary technologies from a functional perspective. But at the same time, all these organizations are seeing the opportunity here and they're seeing that innovation and the pace of change is happening in Drupal with WordPress and with the open source market and they're coming in and they're making acquisitions to go here. Adobe has purchased in the last few years a day software, traditional web content management company, Omniture. They've made, purchased PhoneGap and a bunch of other small things. They've created a product suite, CQ5 and they've actually moved it out of Adobe over into the Omniture group. So now they're selling marketing solutions to marketers, you know, people that buy Omniture in traditional web analytics tools. So very much a CMO sale. Oracle a few years ago or actually just last year purchased FatWire and then they recently purchased in DECA software, Enterprise Search Company. So now they're putting those things together. They also a few years ago purchased Stellent software. So we're starting to see Oracle in opportunities. HP, I mean last probably vendor you'd think would be in this market, but they bought Autonomy another powerful search tool. Autonomy had recently purchased Interwoven. So now they're in the web content management space building cloud web content management solutions. So as you see here these are big companies. These are big companies with very very large market caps and they're all looking at the web and mobile as part of the web in this concept of web experience management to and really attacking this market. You know the vendor that of late that's keeping us up the most and me up the most personally is Salesforce. How many people are familiar with site.com? Few hands. How many people use Salesforce here? Next time you log into Salesforce you'll see an ad for site.com right there. And so this is you know this is an interesting play here. This is you know they're you know they love the no software mantra and it's worked well for CRM and they disrupted that space. But they're going to come in hard to this market. They claim they're the first cloud CMS product in the market as of late and you know be interesting to see how that goes. This is why you hear things like from AQUA talking about things like open sass and open cloud because it's a way to disrupt these people like Salesforce and sort of change the landscape on them when competing with them in deals. So hopefully this gives you an idea at a high level of sort of what the market opportunity is and why the players are now coming in. So let's dig into a little bit so how the analysts perceive this market. So I'm going to walk through some of the magic quadrants and waves to give you an idea of sort of where people perceive Drupal as compared to some of these vendors. So this is the 2011 WCM magic quadrant from Gartner. Are you guys familiar with magic quadrants and Forrester Waves and all that? So in this one Drupal doesn't make the list. Now we see the oracles and autonomies which is now HP and open texts of the world. And so this is one you know I talk to Mick Makomska from Gartner all the time and so of course my question to him is how do we get Drupal on this list? You know we send him references from some of the largest Drupal users, people that are featured in the keynote video, some of the largest brands and organizations that you hear when you go to Drupal.org and how they're using Drupal but yet we still can't crack into this. The piece is this is where the vendor dynamic becomes really really important because the analyst firms don't understand how to evaluate open source projects in the context of these market criteria's they use. You know a magic quadrant is completeness of vision which is sort of a technical view of how well you address the needs of this market tied to ability to execute and ability to execute is very much tied to vendor. Vendor size, how big are you and so it's skewed to a backwards looking view of vendors and skews to larger the vendor the better your ability to execute. More likely you'll be there to take out risk from someone a technology procurement process. You know if you're a buyer you're going to invest $100,000 or $250,000 or a million dollars you're looking to mitigate risk with that purchase and so that's really what this is a measure of on the vertical axis here. And so it's very very difficult to break into this. Particularly when they measure your minimum threshold in license revenue. So the minimum threshold to get into this Magic Quadrant is $10 million in license software revenue. So because it's open source we don't have license software. So I know we get calls all the time when we're selling where's Drupal in the Magic Quadrant? Do you have the Magic Quadrant in the wave that shows me that I can go to take to procurement that I can go take to legal that I can go take to my CIO to validate the choice. You know we've run two or three Drupal projects or maybe we've run 10 or 12 Drupal sites. We understand how it works technically but I need that third party validation that's in order to go get us to move from you know a $50,000 investment to Drupal into a $500,000 investment into Drupal. And so this is really really hard and they don't have a good answer for this frankly. So we badger them over and over again and you'll see when I talk about how you can help the most important thing you can do in competing against these vendors is to talk to the gardeners and the foresters. Tell your story and tell them why they need to be covering them in market overviews. Foresters frankly even worse. So they again Drupal doesn't make this list it's a smaller list one of the things that Forrester does is actually reduces they're constantly trying to reduce the number of vendors that make their market analysis evaluations because they like they want to keep it simple so they'll tell you they have 100 people on the list but you know 8 or 10 make it and sometimes even 5. And for them the minimum threshold is $25 million in software license revenue. So again we talked to them a lot and they understand Drupal we've introduced them to customers people that are using Drupal in a large way whether they're an aquia customer or not frankly to help them tell the story but they're still skewed very much to legacy players, legacy vendors and sort of you know this type of business model that they understand and can compare apples to apples which is around software license revenue. The other thing that they talk about is they want interest from Forrester clients. So how many people here are Forrester clients? Anyone? Couple hands. How many Gartner clients anyone? Alright so you know this is key if they're not getting phone calls about the technology from those of you that have subscriptions and frankly those of you that don't or if you can see them at a conference and ask them about Drupal you know they're hard to put you on the radar they're focused on what their customers and their clients are calling them about. And so we need more people you know they hear vendor pitches all the time we talk to them about Drupal you know every few months but until they hear it from their clients and get that pull from the market they struggle with making sure that we get into these kinds of lists. Now real story groups a little bit different. They have these they don't really do market analysis so relative position on this 2x2 wave matrix this is not supposed to really have any value so unlike the Forester and Gartner ones your goal is not to be upper right hand quadrant if you will but they do these cross checks to give you sort of relatively viability but again you can see what they're trying to measure they say what's the product maturity on the horizontal what's the vendor maturity on the bottom and then what's the relative risk and so last year when Drupal 7 had just been released it had been out for 2 months and so Drupal was way up higher on the risk scale because there weren't a lot of modules there was a relatively new version of the platform so there was a lack of comfort and the report had just come out after Drupal 7 was released. Now Drupal 7 has been out for a year it surpassed Drupal 6 and usage it's coming back into the middle if anywhere in this chart you want to be somewhere in the middle but you don't want to be static static that would be bad so the nice thing about the real story group is of all the firms they do the most technical due diligence of a product what they do is they actually talk to practitioners in fact they don't talk to people like Acquia they're not interested in talking to vendors at all you have to sort of beg, borrow and steal to get any analyst time with them to just talk about Drupal but what they do want to do is they want to talk to your clients they want to talk to practitioners and they'll go in so how many of you have ever read a real story group report? Anyone? They'll go in they're very lengthy they're 12, 15 page reports they'll talk about the architecture the user experience, the paradigms they understand how Drupal works versus a page based system and frankly they have pretty frank feedback they understand what Drupal's shortcomings are and they're pretty open about that they also understand what Drupal's weaknesses are and they undersell those firm but that at least gives you an idea if you're competing in your own organization or if you're selling to your clients and you know there's a competitor they're pretty spot on they score Drupal pretty well and they understand what's good and bad so they have a very similar view of the competitive technologies so if you're looking for how's Drupal going to compete against Sitecore or SDL Tritian or Fatwire or whatever the technology I certainly encourage you to look at this this is why we use the service and actually so now if we go over to the social software market this was the WCM view we see something a little bit different we see a little bit more sort of forward thinking at least from Gartner so this is the social software in the workplace so this is specific for social and community applications behind the firewall within an organization so again the criteria here is lowered it's decreased in terms of the amount of revenue although the requirements for the number of active users and the number of organizations with large scale active users is pretty large actually finding four organizations with 5,000 person intranets that are all active users for Drupal it's not the easiest thing in the world how many people have intranets that big on Drupal or bigger one person I see one hand in the room so we'll need to talk after the session so this is a challenge but the good news is there's a guy Nico Strakos who's in Portugal and Jeffrey Mann who's in the Netherlands are the two analysts that run the they understand Drupal they see the value in the platform and they're bullish on it so they position Drupal as visionary here now you'll notice they say Drupal slash Aquia and this goes back to the vendor issue they don't understand open source projects they don't understand how it fits in their construct so they're looking for a vendor and so that combination is what they end up putting in this report and so when I fill there's these long questionnaires like an RFP it's got 500 questions they're sort of ridiculous but when I do that for these I tell them what we're evaluating is Drupal the project doesn't have anything to do with Aquia when there's company questions I fill it from an Aquia perspective because we can fill the role of the vendor in their mindset and then they insist on putting that in there even though we ask them not to because frankly it doesn't work you know work well we want you regardless of whether you're using Aquia as any of our products we want you to be able to use this report and again provide it to procurement provide it to the people in your organization to build a business case for Drupal and if that having Aquia in this threatens that then we haven't achieved our objective so we continue to push on them now for externally facing software this is social software these are external communities developer communities again Drupal's in the visionary category but if an organization is using a magic quadrant to develop a shortlist Drupal's number four so that's actually great position for us you know it's still early days to be a leader and obviously they don't really believe anyone has established as a true leader in this market but if you go and say who are the top five vendors in this Drupal's number four Life Rays number five so that's you know that's progress in the world of industry analysts again every year they increase the number of seats and users although you know now they're starting to adjust their criteria here explicit to open source but these are the some of the thresholds and criteria by which they evaluate different projects you'll notice that Microsoft and IBM on the internal behind the firewall where a leader is far and away this is SharePoint and the Lotus products now you go to external they're barely laggards and they're falling behind you know people don't use those for external facing things so tremendous opportunity here Forester again same thing as they did in before they're trying to reduce the number of vendors out there this is a little bit old this is from 2010 they haven't updated this report but you know you see the criteria so again we talked to them we told them all about Drupal for external use and they get it but you know it's hard to make the vendors make the waves so that it's all about the questions for them and increasing their visibility of who's using this in large scale deployments so when we talk to the analysts and when they write reports and they cover this market how do they see Drupal so from a strengths perspective they see the value of the community and then the features that come out of that they're driving from a publishing perspective as well as a collaboration and community development perspective and they understand this concept this mean that we created right when I first joined we have social publishing actually resonates with them and so when we talk to them about how do we position Drupal in a particular opportunity whether it's against Oracle or whether it's against Adobe they always come back to the native social capabilities that's the thing that Drupal has above all else that differentiates itself against those in that market the fact that it's open and modular and has a lightweight core is good it's nice for dynamic web application so you know more and more people are building much more interactive and dynamic pages and so obviously Drupal does that well and there's this concept of placeless delivery so I talked about the delivery push to mobile and other applications this is going to be really important but the other thing they say is they talk about how this is a significant paradigm shift for people in terms of how they evaluate web technologies and so it seems native and sort of very intuitive to us those of us have been in the Drupal community for a while you know this concept of having nodes delivering them and putting them wherever and having sort of treating them as atomic elements is very easy but Adobe has a very much a page framework all these legacy systems treat documents content on the web as documents and XML files and HTML files and they treat them and manage them as such and so they have a much more rigid infrastructure and because that's the legacy introducing change there is difficult from a weaknesses perspective I don't think anybody in this room who's experienced with Drupal would be surprised by any of these configuration management content staging you know lack of sort of formal editorial approval processes a lot has happened with workbench and things that are for sort of more editorial process but still that remains an issue here and again it's finally too many enterprise success stories I put all the criteria from these various analyst reports in here to give you an idea of the sense and scale they're looking for and so there's just great success stories around Drupal but we need more of them to convince this community to write about it in a way that becomes an asset for you to use so you can sell Drupal to your clients and within your organizations so how do you impact analyst coverage share success stories that's probably the most important thing you can do talk about your Drupal implementations if anybody wants to geek out with the real story group I'd be happy to make introductions so you can walk them through all the cool things that you've done and showcase the innovation whether you've built cool mobile apps and they have responsive design or you're pushing content from a Drupal repository into a third-party store into other applications those are the kinds of things that help us position Drupal in a way that it should be on their radar in a way that they should be promoting Drupal to their clients that are asking these questions rather than be like well I don't really know what Drupal is but we hear about it a lot and then ask the analysts about Drupal what's the most important thing call them up ask them about it tell them you want to learn more tell them they need to do more research they haven't written it about enough because this is a critical piece to driving them to action so you know Drupal we know the success stories it's becoming a first-class citizen but there's lots of room for improvement here Drupal 7 is a huge initiative and a huge effort and a step in the right direction here and we're seeing a lot more recognition of that but there's more we can do to position Drupal to win so one of the things that we hear the most about is time to market Bob Kerner talked about in the video yesterday in the keynote that they made a commitment to launch a site in 30 days and hit that commitment time to market is critical we're talking to more and more organizations that are rolling out a site or more than one site per week and so cost and speed to market are probably the two biggest issues and it's interesting to see Accenture presenting this in sort of their innovation center for organizations that are focused on innovation they can achieve open source enables them to do that faster it must more cost effectively and so this is where this concept of a shift from to content services is critical you know I mentioned it before placeless delivery from going from page-centric applications to these content services frameworks and being able to articulate what that means from your organization is critical certainly this open modular architecture is important it speeds application development but we all know that community module qualities is variable so you need to be able to you know the 15,000 modules or whatever the number is today is both a blessing and a curse when you talk about innovation within your organization some people love the fact that they get a starting point to achieve their objectives quickly other people like oh wait a minute that sounds like the paradox of choice that's too much how do I figure out what to use I think we all live that and then certainly this restful services a way to deliver these services out to applications and so this is a slide that we use to talk about you know explain the node concept to people that are unfamiliar with Drupal and how you can use nodes and assemble those together to create content types and then link those to other elements and then present views to aggregate and mash those up together to present your content delivery and so you know this is very very different from this page-centric model and so now it's a little bit sometimes hard to grasp for somebody who's coming from a legacy world but at least it's a way for them to start to put this framework together so this is a critical piece of this atomic approach to managing content free of the sort of hierarchical structure to content organizations and really empowering organizations to get more reuse of those sites and we saw both on the IT and the marketing side getting more reuse of those content assets and putting those to work in a way that is critical and then having service level controls to distribute those to use managed permissions on those is critical and taking advantage of some of Drupal's taxonomy capabilities is key the same way is around implicit and explicit personalization and how we organize and deliver content to visitors is key and Drupal does the explicit personalization very well where a visitor comes in they mark their preferences in a profile or in some other field and they deliver content to them dynamically based on those preferences so this is something that Drupal does very very well today and again is interesting and certainly very different from a lot of the legacy systems and even some of the newer systems like you see from Salesforce but now the next generation of this is personalization and doing this implicitly based on traffic behavior, based on GOIP, based on things that we know when you haven't filled out any profile forms, you haven't given us your personalization. So what we think is really really critical that Drupal can do very well just needs investment to make that available as a service or a set of modules within the Drupal architecture because more and more marketers are trying to take advantage of this and then tie this into multivariate testing to make sure that they understand how do they get the more out of their website and so this content services delivery model is critical and what I think is the biggest and I've talked about it a few times I just want to reiterate this is how we support placeless content delivery this is how we're going to build great mobile apps how people are using services module today to take advantage of this and really build amazing things with Drupal. So certainly something is your positioning Drupal it's critical to help your counterparts understand what is it that makes Drupal different why is it this system versus what is it going to work with? The second is the concept that we use that's really resonating a lot is this concept of assembled web experiences this ability to rapidly assemble websites very very quickly from existing building blocks it's a Lego analogy we've moved it to a car analogy because Lego said we can't use Legos in our slides anymore but you know this is nice and actually what we're talking to organizations so now it's when we think of solution distributions we think of just open publish or Commons or open public now we're talking to organizations they're saying we want to create our own internal solution distribution and so when we're rolling out sites because we need to roll out 100 sites through our consumer products division or you know we need to roll out sites for all of our television shows in a major network we want to create a solution distribution that allows us to do that internally and so Drupal is uniquely able to enable to allow you to do this very very quickly and then roll out sites quickly now one of the stories I like to tell with this is the New York Stock Exchange has you know they have a number of teams that build websites design they have a product team that works with the business and then they have development and they've created sort of a approved list of modules if you will to such an extent that now their products teams can configure modules they've gone through a vetting process internally can put a design into the business without ever having any development work done at all they don't write any custom code it's just configuration and assembly of those modules so if their key business criteria is to deploy sites faster this speeds that time to market for them directly you know dramatically and so this is an important piece of their story and so this is another area when we talk to someone who's not unfamiliar with Drupal how this is something that starts to make sense particularly when you deploy sites quickly and then finally I talked about content rich web experiences this is the whole concept of social publishing and this means we created where on the right side of the equation those are where we put the traditional content management vendors the fat wires and adobe's and cq5's and site cores and trillions of the world on the left side here is the social publishing or the social side this is where the jives and emzingas are the intelligence that's really critical for the organization that has 600 websites and 60 cms having to come in and get point solutions just to address particular need only adds complexity to their problem it doesn't help them simplify so as they think about standards the more they can do from a single platform the better and so this is really resonating when we initially drew this picture and sort of think about how to build the other circle we had on here was application framework and talk to the ability to build custom apps we ended up not using it because it complicates the picture but that's sort of the unspoken piece here is you can get content you get community and you get a really powerful web app framework as part of that as well you know and then we all know that the Drupal community is large it's very active there's lots of people contributing but what this raises is it raises questions within these organizations on how does open source development really work certainly people always ask and the other vendors that when you're selling against them Drupal against whatever solution it is these are the questions that they put in their champions minds to ask to raise foot around them who owns the code we all know the answer that but how do I know what will be updated and how do I know that process will be updated and what does that mean for major upgrades as well as for minor upgrades and who pays for the development of new features this is one we had an interesting sales cycle we spent a lot of time on these last three questions you know who pays for the development do I have to contribute custom code back if we write a module that meets our needs do I have to commit it back and then what's the benefit for that and so we spent a lot of time walking them through what we're doing and so we spent a lot of time talking about who pays for development and new features in the open source world frankly is no different than who pays for it in a proprietary world it's just how you pay is different you pay for it when you're buying from Oracle by paying for licenses or buying from site core by buying licenses for that software you know in our world you pay for it by buying paying for the development of it if you can contribute that back more people use it so you don't have to bear the sole cost of that custom development work you don't have to carry that alone you know if you're building some great new capability whether it's an integration with a marketing automation system it's an integration with the digital asset management system or some new capability on your site if that has legs other people can use that and benefit then by contributing back they can contribute to other firms 10 other firms or hundreds of other firms and so you know having examples of this ready whether it's you know views that was developed by Sony music or some of the other modules that are popular in the Drupal world and how they were started and how they've evolved over time by being contributed back to the community is critical in helping them understand that frankly it's not a lot different than what it is in the proprietary world you know I worked at a development management project and we were selling it when we had half an engineer so engine you know when every new feature that we wanted and we sold in a project was based on our ability to close that deal for license revenue you know because otherwise we couldn't fund the engineering I mean is that really that much different than what we're talking about here but now instead of you know making that a opaque process for the buyer who's buying that software now it's a very big difference of that in these ways and you need to tell your story on why it's important for your organization and how others can use it so you can foster collaboration and contribution in that module so that's a really important piece but it still happens almost every time we talk to a large enterprise particularly ones that are unfamiliar or new to open source so quickly I was going to talk through a couple case studies before we open up for questions so I talked about the New York Stock Exchange so the interesting thing about the stock exchange is they were in a two-year project with a proprietary system they spent more than eight figures on that system and they ended up killing it because they had sort of a waterfall approach and it was by the time they got to the end of that two-year project all the requirements from the business had changed and so they ended up killing that project and shifted to Drupal because they needed to focus on more agility and time to get a thriving community, they could evaluate it from a security perspective security was obviously very important for them and then also the participation of the community and so they made Bob Kerner who's the chief digital officer there talks about how they made a bet to deploy their first site in 30 days this is the site and they hit their target now they can't deploy sites fast enough in fact he tells stories now where there was a situation once where they delivered a site like a day or two days early and then one shut it off we'll get all the content in we'll be done in two hours you know because they're so there's so much pent up demand within this organization for new sites and these new capabilities that Drupal brings to them so they've moved all of their new site this is their corporate headquarters so this is the pseudo home page they still have their old home page up but eventually they're going to shift to this they've got new and then the belgian exchange I think so you know they are you know for an organization where time to market is critical but they still have security and enterprise level concerns this has been a huge success for them and they're rolling out rolling out sites very quickly I mentioned a pharmaceutical company they have hundreds of websites dozens of CMS's they were using and experimenting with Drupal in one of their divisions and it started having other sites and other sites very very quickly faster than they could with their other systems primarily it was an oracle shop but this is a place where they were considering Drupal against oracle for big enterprise sales force or the SaaS play and then .NET nuke because they used .NET nuke in some of the divisions around the globe and sort of those are the ones that had the either the most offer or had the biggest penetration and so they the ability to have SaaS options and cloud options for Drupal as well as internal options was a big piece of this is a way to shift the competitive landscape against oracle and then the fact that they were able to build sites very very quickly is the other was the other big piece and so they can deliver business sites to the business faster in fact they figured out that they can build a site in half the time that it goes through their internal system and then for them to actually build the website so now what they're doing is negotiating with them so okay let's create a standard framework to build a site so that way you don't have to go through the same review process and nothing's changed from a security QA perspective so we can shorten that time because now that's become the bat the delay in the process not the actual development work this is an example of a public sector organization Multnomah County and yet they had a platform was difficult to use the issue the biggest issue and this is the funny thing I mentioned before about training and sort of the sizzle demo from vendors in actuality a lot of the proprietary systems are much more difficult to use much more cumbersome require much more end user training but you just don't see it in the on the videos that they put on their website and what they do in their sales demos and then everything that they wanted to do things like imagery sizing or media handling or ad document management that additional license costs so it was like this unending source of costs for them and upgrading sites took a year so they piloted Drupal they were able to extend their feature set across their sites and create a repeatable platform for turnkey site launches and how they can roll out sites according to pre-established templates right out of the gate and nice piece here is not only did they reduce costs but they actually saw it as in performance and site uptime so now they got a better performing platform and save money at the same time and they reduced their training costs dramatically so these are the kinds of organizations Drupal is winning against these larger platforms and smaller organizations like this and in some of the largest global companies in the world which is great news and these are the stories we need to tell more generally so you know when we talk about Drupal to large organizations we certainly talk about more capabilities the fact that you can do more with Drupal it has a flexible architecture so you have a you know it can create assembled this assembled web concept you can add modules very very quickly it's a powerful application development platforms you can build custom apps and you can go to market faster now you'll notice here that the last thing in the market is better value so you know the dirty little secret of open sources it's not free or free as in speech it's actually free as in puppies right and so you know and vendors use that against us oh come on you don't know the costs associated with open source are crazy you don't know what you're getting into beware at least when you buy licenses there will be no other costs that's what they say but you know this is the one to be probably the most careful about it's the thing that we have to be honest with ourselves when you guys to say look this isn't free this is going to have cost but your implementation costs are going to go down your deployment costs are going to go down overall you're going to save money and let's you know let's figure out a way that we can demonstrate that rather than say hey it's free license so you know it goes right to the bottom line because that often isn't the case so how you can help as I mentioned there's lots of reports that showed a bunch of them from looking for global 2000 organizations with more than a thousand employees greater than a billion dollars in revenue communities that have very very large active user bases internal or external communities if your organization looks like this please come talk to me about how you can talk to these organizations or talk to them directly because this is how we make sure Drupal gets up on the landscape gets into their visibility and they start talking about it it's not because Drupal doesn't need to win you're all examples of success stories Drupal this isn't necessary to win but it helps streamline the process it'll help your conversations with your procurement it'll help your conversations with your clients if you have that third party validation that says see I'm telling you what a great platform is and Gartner and Forester and the real story group or whoever the analyst firm is agree with me and they here's backing up what I'm saying so I'm just not out on a limb that helps it helps you reduce your risk and whatever sales process you have additional folks we have real story group e-consultancy in the UK another firm there's a few smaller ones IDC sort of covers the space although they don't write much Altimeter Group covers it from a community software perspective anything you can do to go out and reach out to those folks I'm certainly happy to help facilitate that to spread this story please let me know I certainly encourage you to do that so with that I'm done so thank you so I'm happy to take any questions there's a mic so ask him at the mic hey Brian great speech Nate Wolfson from Digital Bond Glow in Boston my question is I think one of the unique challenges that you didn't talk about from a sales and marketing perspective it's just knowing what else is happening in the Drupal community how would you advise us if we're in a competitive pitch against a site core in Adobe on how to know what the other success stories are that we can point to yeah that's a great question this is one of the reasons we created the site Drupal showcase was to provide a tool that anyone can use to find additional proof points in a particular vertical market so you can go in there and search pharmaceuticals and find lots of pharmaceutical companies and websites built in Drupal you can go in and search financial services and it's a way intended to be a resource so that way doesn't matter what market you're selling into, what size organization there's proof points that you can point to we talk about a million and a half websites built in Drupal what I want to be able to do is have a filter navigable resource for me to sell Drupal to my clients so that's one of the biggest things you'll notice Acquia builds it's on Drupal gardens but there's no Acquia branding on it at all we don't want to the purpose of it is actually not to introduce Acquia into that piece but it allows you to use it as a Drupal resource and anyone can submit sites to it and if you're a Drupal shop and there's a site on there that you built just send us an email there's a form on it and we're happy to give credit and so we want to do that as well and then also between the case studies there and Drupal.org and sort of your peer communities find references this is something that our sales team does constantly who else that looks like this whatever this is is using Drupal and can we introduce to someone who's considering it Steve Strong with Acquia Worldwide what if our clients meet the criteria of the analysts and we're building these sites for them how can we encourage them to reach out and share those stories yeah that's a great question you know you know certainly if they're clients of the firms you know I think it's you know you can ask them to do that but I think what you have to do is present it to them what's the benefit for them and you know I tell people all the time that all these interviews and conversations with analysts are on background you don't have to do a public case study that Gardner because you know a lot of organizations shy away from that can you take a 15 minute call or a 30 minute call or would you respond to an email survey when you do like magic quadrants for Gardner we submit references to them and then they send them a survey via email so you know would they be willing to do that all on background nothing will be used publicly that's about their site to participate and the benefit is again these are assets that they can use to justify continued investment in your firm as a client to justify greater investment in Drupal as a platform or potentially even get it into in a situation where they're making a platform decision this is what happened at the pharmaceuticals company you know honestly it was somebody that looks like all of us in this room young person he's probably 20, 29 and he just had a passion for Drupal and so he started advocating within this global company we need to do this I can do this faster and then deliver it on it hey here's a website you said you needed two weeks here's two weeks and his boss is boss and so that rolled up to the head of marketing IT systems within this global company and it's interesting to sit in the room where he's there and you know Akwe is there talking about how we can help them make this technical selection for Drupal and we let him do all the talking because he's the credible one in the resource we're just the vendor we can just show you all the stuff that maybe he hasn't seen or isn't available walking through their 20 point demo script if you will none of those other people in the room are technology savvy they don't know open source they you know they're business people that are trying to make that decision so the benefit for that person is here you give them more third party validation so you're not as exposed in your organization right there's that whole mantra that if you buy big blue you know you'll never get fired you know I think Drupal is still in that phase where if you buy Drupal and it doesn't go well you know there's risk there you may or may not get fired so you know having that validation for the champions that really believe in it helps to reduce their own personal risk any other questions well great everyone thank you for attending