 I realize that I'm probably the only thing standing between everyone in drinks or dinner, so the last session of the day, the enviable spot. My name is Matt Schlesman. I'm with Blink Reaction. I'll give a little bit of introduction here in a minute in terms of who Blink Reaction is. Just some quick background on myself because I want to talk a little bit about today about why the enterprise needs Drupal and why I feel that Drupal needs the enterprise. And this is all from my perspective. My background, I've been in technology working with software and technology and services firms for about 16 years. Historically, most of the work that I'd done had been at enterprise software companies with proprietary software solutions. I was introduced to Drupal about four plus years ago and got engaged. My first DrupalCon was DrupalCon San Francisco and certainly it's been a great experience. I've learned a lot and it's been in a lot of ways eye-opening and very refreshing. I want to weave and give you some perspective just from my perspective in terms of what I've seen in working with enterprise customers and enterprise accounts, but also what I've seen in terms of Drupal and the impact that Drupal can have on those organizations and vice versa. At any point you can feel free to interrupt me if you have questions or any points you'd like me to expand on further. I do want to keep this interactive so we're going to have a couple of points where everybody can jump in and throw out some ideas or some feedback. So stay tuned and just to keep everybody enticed, we've got some free giveaways here. Some Reese's peanut butter cups if you contribute and offer some ideas. So with that, we'll jump right in. I'm going to start by giving a little shameless plug for Blink Reaction and who we are. I run sales at Blink Reaction so I'm more than happy to provide you with some context on what we do. So Blink Reaction, we are an enterprise Drupal consultancy. We are focused on Drupal and delivering great solutions on Drupal, both great customer and user experiences, great high performing solutions, but also great customer experiences in terms of our customers that we're developing the sites for and building the sites with. We're a global organization so we're based out of New Jersey, just outside the New York metro area, and we have another office up in the Cambridge area just outside of Boston as well as a number of remote employees around the United States as well as we also have some offices in Europe distributed throughout various regions in Europe. At our core, our core competency is Drupal. So we've been working with Drupal since back in the days of Drupal 4 to date. We've built just over, I think, a thousand sites in Drupal 7. That's between new sites that we've built as well as sites we've migrated. We've run into some situations where we've got customers we worked for, we've migrated hundreds of sites at just those individual customers. We've been involved in some very, very high traffic Drupal implementations. We've done some great work with customers like NBC Sports in terms of working on some of the Olympic sites with them. A lot of high traffic activity on those sites. We've done some great work around sites like the 9-11 Memorial site. Around the 10th anniversary of 9-11, a ton of traffic, a ton of activity pushed to that site, a ton of page views. So we understand what it takes to implement sites that perform and scale but also deliver a great experience. We're very focused on high return. So one thing that I think is near and dear to everyone's heart of blink is making sure that we deliver on time and on budget. I've worked with a lot of enterprises in my experience, again, in a variety of different capacities. But at the end of the day, if you're engaging with a customer and one of those two things is missing, either you're on budget but you're not on time or you're on time and you're not on budget, that is never a good situation. So those two things are near and dear to our heart. And we're able to accomplish that through very, very seamless project management and through a very structured methodology that we approach engagements with. We also, a key component of our offering is also providing training. So Ray Saltini, who's here in the audience, runs our Blink Institute. I'm not sure some of you may have had an opportunity to attend some training that Ray did here just yesterday. I think it was focused around symphony, some symphony training, and we're going to be doing a lot of training in coordination with Sensio Labs coming up, so we're pretty excited about that. But we offer training across a variety of different capacities, content editors, content administrators, all the way to site administrators, developers, and everything in between. So when we talk about the spectrum of the services that we offer at Blink, we offer the front end aspects of engaging around creative and user experience. We do provide consulting around Drupal architecture, continuous integration, best practices, things of that nature. The bread and butter of our business is Drupal development, custom integrations, and then rounded out again by, as I mentioned before, the Blink Institute and the training and education that we can offer. I mentioned kind of informing what I'm going to talk about today is really a lot of the work that I've had the opportunity to do in engaging with various enterprise customers. Blink certainly has engaged with a lot of great organizations, great enterprises. You can see some of those represented up here. And some of these we worked in, engaged with, in the sole delivery for that customer. And in other situations, we've been working with partners. I even see some of our partners here in the audience today, like VML, and we've been working with them at Whole Foods. So some great things going on. So with that, we'll jump right into the content for the session today. The shameless plug is over. So I want to talk a little bit about Drupal and the enterprise. And I thought the way we'd start this off is by thinking about personas. So anybody familiar with user-centered development and development of personas? Great, so you guys are going to be really good at this. So we're going to start off first with, let's talk about the persona of the Drupalist. So as I was trying to think of, okay, who's a good sort of representative for the Drupalist? Well, that's an easy one. I'll pick Therese. He's nice and easy. So tell me what are some characteristics of the Drupalist? I'll take any ideas that folks want to throw out. And remember, there's free candy. So commitment to the platform. Commitment to the platform, okay? There you go. Peanut butter cup. Yeah? Vision. Vision? Okay. And remember, think more broadly, too, about this. This is any Drupalist, right? What are the characteristics of the Drupalist? What are things that are important to Drupalist? Community. He already got it. I'll give you another one if you want. Community. I think that's key. What else? Quality. Who said that? Oh. All right, you know. Do it. Aren't you going to shock me, ready? Oh. Good catch. Good catch. I've been coaching my son's Little League team this year, so working on my pitching. I like quality. Yeah. Transparency. I like that. All right, here you go. Almost got it there. Any others? Reuse. Okay. Good. All right. So I think I actually gave this some thought as well in terms of what are some of the values of a Drupalist? And I think there's some good overlap between some of the things that just came out of the discussion and some of the ideas I came up with as well. I think, you know, community, first and foremost. I mean, look at what we're all doing here, right? The DrupalCon events, Drupal Meetups, Drupal.org. There's so many examples of why community is important to the Drupalist and the Drupal community. We see it every day. I think, I'll be honest. I mean, I think there's a lot of folks that are excited to be a part of the Drupal community and it's important to them that they're getting exposed to cool technology. I mean, I'm walking through some of these sessions. People are excited to hear about, hey, tell me about this new module you built or tell me about how you set up a site to do this. And the technology is, you know, as you think about the Drupalist, right? You have different types of Drupalist. You know, people who do it as their day job. But then you also have people who, you know, if they have another day job that might be unrelated and they're going home in their nights and evenings and they're, you know, getting engaged in the community and they're working on Drupal. You know, the technology piece, I think, is something that gets people excited and keeps them engaged. Most Drupalists that I've known are excited and most developers I've known are excited about solving problems, right? Some people are excited to solve very, very difficult problems. And other people may be the really, really difficult problems not so much, but they like generally solving problems. And, you know, they find that rewarding and satisfying. And so I think that's, to me, that's something that's a value that, you know, aligns well to Drupalist. And then, you know, I always sense when I'm engaging the folks in the Drupal community and especially here at DrupalCon, making a difference is always something that's kind of a core value and is important to people. And, you know, what does that mean? Well, making a difference can happen on a number of levels. You know, maybe it's helping somebody out in the community, somebody who's coming up to speed on Drupal or learning Drupal. Maybe it's, you know, writing or contributing a module or, you know, contributing a patch to fix it and resolve an issue with something that's out there. But being able to somehow make an impact, and that impact can actually be broader than just some of those point examples, you know, making an impact to provide something that, you know, makes a difference in people's lives. I think, you know, at the end of the day, it's being able to work on something and deliver something that's of value, right? It's got value. And I'm not talking about monetary value necessarily, but it's delivering some value in some way to individuals or to people or to others. So, I think there's some good alignment, you know, it's not necessarily 100% overlap, it's some good alignment with some of these things that I was independently thinking about as well in terms of the Drupalist and the persona of the Drupalist. So, now we're going to talk about the enterprise. And, you know, for my persona of the enterprise, anybody know who this is? No one? You're right, she does. So, it's Meg Whitman. So, Meg was the CEO of eBay and is now the CEO of HP. You know, she certainly is, you know, as I thought about a face that I could put up here, a face that would identify with the enterprise. You know, I was kind of torn between Meg Whitman and Jack Walsh, but Jack Walsh retired, right? So, or Jack Walsh. Jack Walsh retired from GE. So, Meg Whitman is our face of the enterprise today. So, let's now talk a little bit about the enterprise and what are some things that, you know, when you think about a business or an enterprise, what are some things that are important to an enterprise? Scalability. Scalability, right? Want another one? Sure. All right. Yep. It's through dinner. Yes. Support. Yeah. Yes. Security. All right. Can I get it there? You might have switched it over here. Cost. Cost. Yeah. Why don't you vendor-lock it? One of them? Wow. Okay. Any others? SLAs. SLAs? Okay. No need. No need. You're good. Good. Any others? Come on. Okay. Okay. Yeah. You're good. Okay. Yeah. Or maybe even, yeah. Yeah. So taking that, and I kind of went through the same exercise, right? I sat down and ate a few Reese's Cups and had a little time to think about this. It was probably before. It was probably before. Yes. Yeah. I think I worked for him. Yeah. My definition of an enterprise would be, how would I define it? A business or an organization, right, that is looking at and evaluating technology and is looking at leveraging Drupal for some business means. It doesn't necessarily have to be. But I also think, well, let me actually, let me step back. The needs, as the enterprises grow larger, I think the needs change. Right? So the three-store piece, the chain may be less concerned about security. They may be less concerned about compliance or control or things like that. But actually, so let me step back and let me redefine. I actually think when I'm talking about the enterprise, it would be probably more akin to a larger organization, right? That starts to run into some of these challenges or constraints in areas like security, like control, like things of that nature. Yeah. That's what I think of it. I think, you know, I think for the purposes of what I'm contemplating here, I think that I've kind of abstracted at a level. But, you know, some of the characteristics that I'll speak to here that I think represent the enterprise, I think some of them will align to the three-store pizza joint. I mean, so there's a great example. You know, they may want a solution to address their business needs. We want to get our menu out there. We want to be able to publish our hours and our phone numbers so that, you know, people know how to contact us and how to get ahold of us, right? Some of these things will align to them, but really, I think in terms of the context in which I'm approaching this, I'm thinking a little bit larger than that as well, right? So it doesn't have to be large global international organization, but certainly some of the things that I'm going to speak to as we go through these characteristics, I think it'll give you a better sense of, I think it's typically going to be large organizations. So, you know, more than, you know, 1,000, 2,000 employees doesn't necessarily have to be international or global, but they're going to be facing some of these challenges and some of these situations, yeah? So, you know, in terms of what they value, what enterprises value, so certainly I think I just touched on this, but solutions to address business needs, you know, an enterprise is a business, and at the end of the day, they've got some mission and something they're driving to, and in order to do that more effectively, they need solutions to address their business needs. They value that. But, you know, coming to the point, I think somebody brought up earlier, always interweave with that is ROI, right? So what value can this deliver to the business and what sort of return is there? You know, I have yet to run into an organization that just takes on technology projects because they're fun. There's always some sort of, it's in response to some sort of a business need, and in almost every case, not every, but almost every case, they're actually looking at understanding what the ROI is. You know, I've worked with some organizations that go so far as to every technology project that they have that's over, I think it was over $50,000. They had to justify with an ROI business case, and they actually had to track the metrics throughout the engagement and formally report that at the end of the engagement, and they tracked this, you know, repeatedly as they would engage on different projects throughout the organization. It was really interesting to see how they approached that and how it changed their thinking throughout the project and throughout the process. Some are less formal than that, but certainly I think that's a real core value of the enterprise. We actually heard this morning from the CIO of Whole Foods in Dries' keynote about one of the points that he touched on was speed to market, right? Speed to market is important for enterprises. You know, the competitive advantage, being able to deliver in a quickly, in a way that quickly is responsive to market needs. Speed to market is often a very important point. Another point that actually he touched on in the keynote at the CIO of Whole Foods was flexibility. So often a lot of organizations are constrained. They may be constrained in terms of budget. They may be constrained in terms of internal, you know, compliance and processes and things they have to align under, and wherever possible, they need some range of flexibility to meet their customer's needs and to provide these business solutions. So flexibility is really something that's of great value to enterprises. I mentioned compliance, and I think you had mentioned this. The gentleman back there had mentioned it in terms of controls. Compliance can be on a number of levels. I've seen compliance be, you know, important or required within an enterprise at the IT level, certainly in terms of, you know, what technologies can you leverage within a given enterprise? Compliance in terms of security standards or different standards that the organization has. But I've also seen compliance from a business standpoint. So certainly with, you know, Sarbanes-Oxley and the introduction to that, I've seen a lot of situations where enterprises have to, through technologies that they're implementing, they are implementing controls and business controls and things like segregation of duties and leveraging these systems to document those types of things. So compliance is something that as you get into, this is where as the, you know, not so important to the three person pizza joint down the street, but as you get into larger organizations, compliance becomes more and more important. Security, I think that's almost a no-brainer, right? I don't know of any organization, regardless of their business mission, that doesn't have some interest and or concern about security today. And we see it, you know, we see it in the news. We see, you know, Target, I think the latest data breach was with eBay, actually, with them exposing some credit card numbers or some other, perhaps not as accounts, it was accounts and passwords, right? It is always in the news. It's always in the front of folks mind, folks minds from an enterprise perspective. And then the other one that was also mentioned out here, scale, right? There are, while there are some businesses out there that are not interested in growth, you know, most of them and most organizations I've been involved in are, they have a mission and they're trying to drive that mission and they're looking to grow and they need to scale and they need solutions and technologies that can scale effectively with them. So that, I think, it aligns well to some of the ideas and some of the things that we're coming out in the discussion there in the audience. So now let's think about, between the enterprise and the Drupalist, what kind of alignment do we have? You know, we'll try a simple Venn diagram, right? So, you know, and I think about some of the aspects that are important to the Drupalist, like community, cool technology, you know, those don't necessarily, immediately as you look at it, they don't pop up again and you don't immediately say, oh yeah, those align pretty well to what the enterprise is looking for as well. And vice versa on the other side, speed to market and compliance, well, those aren't always going to bubble right to the top of the list of overlapping there either and good alignment there either. I think the ones that immediately come to mind at a high level are going to be value. So, Drupalists want to make a difference. They want to provide something of value. And enterprises are always on the lookout for value. They have a different term for value. They would call it ROI, right? They would derive their value in that way. And certainly both are looking interested in solutions to challenging problems, maybe from different perspectives, but certainly looking for solutions to those problems. But you know, as we explore this conversation further, I think some of these other aspects will actually start to come into a little bit more alignment, not just the ones that are immediately appearing to have some overlap there. So I'll get to the heart of it now. My perspective on why I think the enterprise needs Drupal. So I think some of these things, if you've been around the Drupal space, some of these things might just pop off at you as kind of being obvious. Some of these things hopefully aren't so obvious. I tried to pull this together considering the different types of attendees we have here at DrupalCon. Some of them are learning more about Drupal and maybe looking to take some information back to their stakeholders and their business. Some of them are learning more about getting involved in the community and otherwise. So hopefully this gives kind of a broader spectrum. But I really think, you know, when we think about solutions to business needs for the enterprise, open source, the openness of Drupal is really, really critical. It is not limiting, right? It is open. It provides flexibility. You can integrate it. You can modify it. You can tweak it. You can adjust it to really meet your needs and to deliver the type of solution that you need to address your business needs. Certainly, as folks are jumping in and they're trying to look at solutions to address their business needs, one thing that people are always interested in, whether it's proprietary software or open source software, they are always interested in, how do I get a head start? How do I jump ahead? You know, I've worked at some of the proprietary software companies I've worked at, you know, sole technologies like ERP-related technologies and mobile technologies. And one of the first things that customers or prospective customers would always ask when you come into a conversation is, well, this is really interesting technology, but do you have any pre-built components? Are there pre-built kind of solutions that I can leverage? You know, whether it's kind of a starting point that I can then build on top of? No one wants to reinvent the wheel. Nobody wants to start building something completely bespoke from the ground up. So this concept of having, you know, the modules out there within the community, the contributed modules, being able to leverage those pre-built features, even if you're not going to leverage them, you know, stock as is and you're going to be tweaking or adjusting them slightly, having that head start is really, really critical for the enterprise. We've heard earlier, vendor lock-in. I think this is a really important aspect. And you're going to see that iterated on a couple of points here in a couple of slides. But I have seen, on a number of occasions, organizations, and actually, I've been on the other side of this where I've been working to provide solutions, proprietary solutions to enterprises that lock people in. The technology is a lock-in, right? And ultimately, what that means is, when the organization decides at some point that they want to shift and take a different direction, either maybe the product was not evolving to their satisfaction, or they weren't happy with the level of support they were needing, or maybe even what happens more commonly is their needs change. And the product that they thought would be a great product for them in the long term, it actually ends up only working for the short term, and they have to shift directions, shift technologies, look at a new product. And in a situation with vendor lock-in, oftentimes it's like, well, toss that out the door, let's start over. Let's look at things afresh. So without having that vendor lock-in and that proprietary technology, that's really of great, great value to the enterprise. Certainly, I think is a great example of why the enterprise needs Drupal. So let's... I don't think so. I don't think that AQUIA is... There may be examples where you'd say if you're hosting with AQUIA, and let's say AQUIA shuts out the lights and turns things off. Sure, you'd have to figure out how you're going to move your site to another hosting provider, but I don't think there's anything within Drupal itself that is so locked in or proprietary to any one organization. Let's just say we are locked in. I, as an enterprise customer, would have to go to my source code and as an enterprise customer, that's not what I'm going to do, because the reason as an enterprise customer you take the technology and you avoid that kind of lock-in is because you don't ever want to ring the button. Well, I think what's different in this situation is when you get into an enterprise, like a lock-in type situation, you get into situations like where you work with proprietary vendors. So I'm going to guess, as part of your contract you're asking them, you're saying, what about source code escrow? I want to make sure that if you go under or you go away, I've got some means to recover from that. Well, the great thing, even if you had a situation where that vendor went under and you went to the escrow account and you pulled the source code out, what are you going to do with it? But the difference here, the difference here is you have the code. It's open source, you have the code and it's not just one firm, like Acquia, that can help you work with it. It's a whole community of people. It's hundreds of firms that are out there that can, you know... When you look at that, and let's just say I have put on my truck. If Acquia was to go away, I would probably consume the resources of ten of those smaller companies. I don't think it's really viable. I don't think you could actually do it. I think the market is helping. I would agree, so I would say... There are lots of capable agencies that are all super busy. There's nothing Acquia is doing for you that's in the private area. This isn't an emergency situation for you to have an Acquia, but I do think Acquia's dominance in this market is dangerous. But it's not. That's the point we're on. I would also say that, as an example, Blink, we currently have about 80 employees. We're continuing to grow. We're going to be closer to 120 employees by the end of the year. We're not alone in that. Drupal firms are growing. The community is growing. You might be surprised in terms of the degree of capacity beyond just one firm, beyond Acquia that's out there to offer services and to support you. I think the talent shortage... That's probably a topic for a separate discussion, but I believe there are things afoot and things happening in terms of the talent shortage, both in terms of as the technology improves, as we move to Drupal 8, as training improves, as education improves. I think there are a lot of things happening. If there's more and more demand, there's going to be more and more supply. I think that's the nature of it. I would not have looked at Drupal. I would not be here if there was no GA on the map. So that may be... y'all may be underestimating the amount of support and supply side impact that Drupal 8 and their alliance all in... the not invented here issue going down a bit in being... using more widely accepted components. So... I think it's a good point. It's a good discussion point. Is this cut for? I owe you one, because you answered one of my questions. Oh, I did. Well, good. I'd be happy to talk with you afterwards if you'd like more. There's no question about... I think that... I think AQUIA has been played a critical role in terms of helping enterprises to be able to start to make that move and make that transition. In full disclosure, I used to work at AQUIA. I don't argue with that point at all. I think that's a very good point. Yeah. That's fair. But I also... I do think the community is continuing to evolve. I think the ecosystem is continuing to evolve. So we should... I'd love to talk further with you to expand on that further. But yeah, you bet. But hey, we'll get to another Reese's Cup later. So let's talk about ROI and why the business needs Drupal or why the enterprise needs Drupal from an ROI standpoint. So I think... I always have to look at cost. Open source free. But is it really free? We'll always hear the discussion and the argument that I think is totally valid, which is, well, the software is free, but I have to pay for implementation services. I have to pay for hosting. I have to... There is a cost associated with it that is absolutely and undeniably true. However, I've been on the other side of this coin. Even with proprietary software solutions, even if you took away the software cost, those costs still exist within the enterprise. You still have to host. You still have to do implementations. And when you get into any sort of more complex software that's supporting the enterprise, it's pretty common that you're either going to have to hire talent in-house to be able to handle that or to go outside and contract with other third-party resources to be able to handle those implementations. So when we talk about the prices right being free, it's not the implementation, the hosting. Things like that are never free, but it's the software itself. You're not paying upfront license fees. You're not paying annual maintenance fees on an ongoing basis. So I think that's a very important consideration, especially when you start to look at it from the perspective of an enterprise, I sold software at large software packages to enterprises. I know how much enterprises spend on license fees and on maintenance fees, but that's not the actual amount. I've already just spoken briefly to the ongoing cost of maintenance. I think relative to certainly there's the reduction and there's no maintenance fees associated with a software license for Drupal, but maybe even more importantly here is as you think about the ongoing kind of maintenance of Drupal and the iteration on Drupal, if you think about Drupal and the Drupal community think about it in terms of if it were a software company in the software organization. Think about the number of hours that go into patches to updates to new modules that are being contributed. Pull that all together. I don't know what that number is, but I know it's a big number in terms of the number of hours, and if you consider that the R&D investment that goes into Drupal, I think you'd be challenged to find into ongoing R&D around a product line that they've launched. I think you'd even be stretched to say that companies like Oracle are achieving that kind of scale. So I think that's important because the benefit coming out of that is the ongoing level of innovation and the level of change and updates to the technology that are coming out of the community are very, very important as you think about the ongoing cost of maintenance. I mentioned innovation here as well. I had heard this analogy, the one I just provided to you made a few years ago, and it always sticks with me as you think about how many hours are going into investing. People's times, nights, weekends. I know people who are part of the Drupal community because they're passionate about Drupal. They'll go home on a Saturday night and they'll hop in and start working on their module or working on something else. It's incredible the degree of contribution that goes in and what that actually means tangibly when you think about it in terms of the hours invested into Drupal and into the technology that we all can benefit from. Again, coming back to this point, I think we sufficiently talked through this one earlier but I think the no-vendor lock-in from an investment standpoint is also an important consideration. We can talk later about that. Speed to market. Another important point. So I mentioned earlier this concept, the different modules, the contributed modules that are out there. The fact that you have a starting point, even if the features that you need out of the modules aren't exactly the way you want, you've got a starting point and you can take it and build on it from there. Certainly in terms of speed to market, as you think about new technologies that are coming into the market, new systems or sites that you need to integrate with, the speed in which the community is producing modules that can allow you to leverage those new technologies to integrate with those new systems or those new solutions, it's really quite remarkable. This speaks to the point some of the discussion we were having earlier. The variety of resources on the market that are able to help you, support you with Drupal and help you to implement. You can see it here. You go down on the floor and you see all the different firms that have booths and so many more people are attending that work with organizations to help them with Drupal either on an independent consulting basis or otherwise. They don't even have booths, but there's so many more people here in attendance that are working and offering services around Drupal. I think back to, I had one particular proprietary company that I worked at where we had a solution that we would offer and I remember I was engaging, it was with GE. We'd like to, we know we're going to need consulting services to implement this, and we'd like to use your services, but boy, they're kind of expensive. Do you have anybody else who implements this? You can recommend and the answer was, well, we have this partner that we sort of have trained on it, but they sort of know it. They're probably going to have to engage us in the back end, but you could talk to them. What we were basically telling them was you don't have any other options. I'm sorry, that's all we've got. If you look out at the Drupal ecosystem here and just the variety of options and the different resources that you have available to you to be able to leverage for Drupal, I think that's a great, great value to the enterprise. The ecosystem is very, very healthy. And certainly taking that a step further, so built up around that, you talk about companies like Aquia, but there's other companies as well, hosting offerings from Pantheon and Black Mesh and Rackspace. Other solution offerings that are coming to the table, I think OpenSAS was one I recently heard about with New Civic and coming to the table with New Civic and Aquia. These are all solutions that are either available on the market or are coming to the market that can actually help you to accelerate that pace further, to give you that ability to start one step ahead and to jump in one step ahead of things, and helping with the speed to market. And certainly flexibility. This is always a very important point, you know, integration. I can't say enough about integration, you're going to see that iterated at a couple of different points throughout here. I spent some time, I've worked with a number of insurance companies in the past, one that comes to mind is Allstate Insurance. Anybody here work for Allstate? No, nobody from Allstate. Well, Allstate's an interesting company with technologies that they're trying to leverage, but Allstate, like pretty much every other insurance company I've ever worked with, they have legacy systems, mainframe systems that are not going away. These are systems that they've been using for years and years and years to support their insurance business. And so they are not going to look at technologies or solutions that cannot integrate. Integration is so, so important and you would think, you know, who's going to go back and integrate companies like Allstate and Nationwide and, you know, the big insurance firms. And that's just one example of one industry. I'm quite confident you can see that across a variety of different industries. You can see that occurring. You know, the best thing about Drupal is if you don't like it, you can change it. You've got the source code, you can change it, but you want to make sure you change it in the right way, right? That's always important to do it the right way. The old tag line of don't hack core. One other element that I think is sometimes maybe overlooked that I think is just having a little bit different perspective is important is the separation of the theming and the presentation layer from the configuration and the features layer. You know, I've had, I can recall, a specific conversation when I was, again, working with a proprietary software company not to be named, that we had a customer we were working with we were building a mobile app. And the mobile app, we had laid out a number of different fields on a form and a screen and the customer said, gee, I'd really like to be able to change and change the way in which this field on the form is displayed, right? And I remember the conversation being, and they just want a very, very small change and the conversation went too well. That's kind of just the way our software works and we could probably give you the ability to capture that additional field of data that you're looking for, but we have to reconfigure the screen and use this different feature. It's a little tiny change in the screen and yet sometimes, because of the way the proprietary technology has developed, there wasn't that flexibility. So again, this is something that I think is really important with Drupal, that degree of flexibility, even down to the level of being able to tweak or tune or adjust the presentation in any way you need it. It's very important. So I think I believe it enough in terms of why the enterprise needs Drupal. Let's talk a little bit about why Drupal needs the enterprise. But sometimes maybe not is immediately clear. So community. We talked about community as being very, very important to the Drupalist and I think it's critical to Drupal overall. The health of the community is critical and I'm a big believer that enterprises are critical to providing that capital to continue to keep the community vibrant. So are they directly infusing capital and money into the community itself? Well, most of the time no. In some situations they are. We'll talk about that in a minute, but most of the time, enterprises are leveraging Drupal and they may be engaging a firm like a company like Aquia or a firm like Brilliant Reaction to help them with their Drupal sites and the Drupal work that they're doing. And those communities, those organizations in turn are supporting the Drupal community. They are bringing more Drupalists on board and creating more more people within the Drupal community. But also I think what's happening is organizations in a lot of cases are going out and they're investing internally to bring Drupal developers on board, right? They're paying for those developers to come on board. Jobs are being created and this is all jobs are being created. People then find that, hey, I can get paid to work on Drupal. All of a sudden there's more and more interest in driving and building the community and I think, again, that investment that's flowing back indirectly from the enterprises through organizations or through individuals back into the community is really, really important. And that also in turn then helps to fuel the continued growth of the community. The community needs to continue to grow and that growth is going to be accomplished by more and more people using Drupal, hiring more Drupalists, engaging more Drupal organizations, more Drupal services companies. That's going to continue to be, it's sort of a virtuous circle if you will in terms of how that all flows together. And I think that enterprises are a key, key component to the health of the Drupal community. Another thing that I think is important is that, you know, once enterprises introduce technology into their organization they start to leverage technology. All of a sudden there's a tail on that technology. If we were, let's imagine a world, this won't happen, but let's imagine a worst case world where as of today no enterprises would do any more projects going forward on Drupal. There's no more Drupal work. There's still a tail on that because enterprises when they implement solutions leveraging technologies those can be sticky. I was in discussion with an organization last week that's still leveraging Drupal five sites. Now they haven't had a compelling business need to go out and update them or change them though I think there's lots of reasons why they may want to uplift them or do that, but the fact that those sites have been built and they're continuing to be utilized and serve a function and a purpose there's a tail that gets created here and it just continues to lengthen that tail on the Drupal community. I do think these are sort of concepts of they're not always directly apparent but I do think enterprises play a key role in the health of the overall Drupal community. When you think about solutions to problems, why does Drupal need the enterprise for solutions to problems? Well, I think we've seen examples over the past three, four years of situations where Drupal has run into some sticky problems, some challenging problems, scaling, performance, things of that nature and it's not always a case but it's quite often that what's pushing that envelope and what's pushing Drupal to solve those challenges and solve those problems is often enterprise challenges and enterprise needs and we need to be able to handle more page views we need to be able to scale faster we need to be able to manage more sites that's speeding the overall solutions to those problems but also the innovation, the rate at which that innovation is occurring. Now, would that innovation and would that problem solving occur independent of the enterprises? Yeah, it may but my argument is the enterprise plays a great role in accelerating that and helping to drive that forward and I think that's really critical for Drupal and certainly comes back to integration as well, right? The more you know, you even saw it in Dries' keynote this morning in terms of his vision for where Drupal is headed where the web is headed, right? Integration is really a key component to all of this and last but not least making a difference. So why does Drupal need the enterprise in terms of thinking about it from the perspective of making a difference? Well, in a lot of cases, the enterprise is opening up and exposing opportunities for Drupal to provide value and to make an impact for people to be able to see an example of, hey, look, look at how my module is being used out there and what great use it's being put to and how people are achieving value from it. Look at examples of, you know, as you think about the businesses and they're generating ROI, they're getting returns from their use of Drupal in many cases, but they're not just going to say, oh, that was great and we're going to move on to some other technology. They're going to look at this and they're going to say, we've really seen some very demonstrable returns out of this. We're going to continue to invest in Drupal. Drupal usage continues to grow and that just increases the growth of an investment into the Drupal community per, you know, kind of this concept of the virtuous circle that I was talking about earlier. So Reese's Cups comes back to Reese's Cups. Does anybody remember the commercial from the 70s? Probably not the 70s, the 80s, right? You got your chocolate in my peanut butter. You got my peanut butters in your chocolate. Let's see if this works. We'll even do a little of that. Peanut butter. You got peanut butter in my chocolate. It's great to go out now. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. So I like this analogy because as you think about it, Drupal and the Enterprise are like chocolate and peanut butter. I'm not going to say which is which. You can figure out which is chocolate, which is peanut butter. But I really think you don't necessarily logically always think of these things as working well together and being very tasty together. But they certainly are. So a couple of ideas. I've got a few minutes left and I want to spend a few minutes talking about ways that I think are important for Drupal to continue supporting the Enterprise and vice versa. I won't belabor these points, but I think they're important. So one is I think Drupal needs to continue innovating. I think that's been key to the success of Drupal to date and I think it's going to be critical to this success of Drupal going forward with Drupal and beyond. That comes right hand in hand with a key element of that is the growth of the community and the pace of the growth of the community. I think that's really, really important. Integration. Integration, integration, integration. So open systems play very, very nicely together. However, they also need to play very, very nicely with closed systems. So leveraging standards. More and more enterprises are going to be able to take Drupal and leverage Drupal the more they can easily integrate it with not just some other proprietary systems they have, but even the example of the all state, the claims system that they're using this old legacy proprietary mainframe system. Growth. I think the growth and continuing to find ways to grow the community is really, really important for some of the points that we talked about earlier and somebody made the point of quality earlier in the back. So quality is critical. If you think about ways that the Drupal community and Drupal can support the enterprise it's quality, it's being rigorous about security, it's being rigorous about performance, keeping those things in mind. Really, really important. And last but not least this point's for Ray because I knew he'd like this. Educate. I can't tell you there's not a great understanding pervasive understanding of Drupal across enterprise organizations. There's a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt and the best way I think we can overcome fear uncertainty and doubt is through education. It's by engaging in conversation by helping to dispel myths and helping people to be informed and make informed decisions. So I think that's an important way in which Drupal can help to support the enterprises through ongoing education. So let's talk about how the enterprise can support Drupal. I was sitting down with one of our customers the other day and this is a big enterprise customer. They are on the cusp of commencing a migration to a new Drupal platform that includes I think in total, initially it's going to include maybe 500 sites this year and I think it's going to range up closer to 3,000 over the next couple of years. And as we were having this discussion they said, you know, gee, we've been thinking a lot about how we're leveraging Drupal and how we're really taking away some of the benefits of Drupal but we really need to start thinking as an organization about ways that we can give back and how can we give back. It's not just a one way street and I think one aspect is not being afraid to contribute code back to the community. There are great examples of how this has happened. I remember a few years ago, the White House and contributed back a number of modules that they had developed for the WhiteHouse.gov site. A great example I can remember is a couple of organizations ago I had a consultant that was on my team that was working with Thompson Reuters and he was building a site for Thompson Reuters where he needed a particular feature where he could do kind of a table where he could do inline editing in a Drupal site and so he whipped up this little simple module he called Table Views and it was at the beginning of the project he put it out, he contributed it and continued down the project with Thompson and when they came to the end of the project all of a sudden he was kind of doing some clean up and he went out and he looked on Drupal.org and all of a sudden not only had a couple of bugs been fixed by other people who had grabbed the module and started using it within the community they had fixed some bugs but they had also added some new features to it and he's able to look at that and take that and pull that down and take advantage of that in the site that he was building for Thompson. So stories like that that happens. That stuff is real and that's just one example from my personal experience but there may be others in the room who can speak to examples like that so contributing code can have some real benefits. Getting involved so getting involved can be really simple it can be as simple as hosting a local meetup it can be as simple as sponsoring a Drupal camp when you have these local meetups or regional Drupal camps I think the people who are attending in order to defray the cost they rely on some of the sponsorships to be able to help pay for lunch or help to cover some of the cost of the facilities or things like that and that can make a real difference. There are also some initiatives underway in which if you've got some very specific needs or specific focus one specific initiative I'll call out that Aqua is driving is this large scale Drupal initiative and if you're an enterprise and you're focused on scale and performance what they're doing is they're working with organizations to invest to help again solve some of these stickier more challenging issues associated with scaling Drupal so if that's something that's of importance to you that might be worth looking into and last but not least again on the part of the enterprise is education being able to educate and engage both educate internal employees and people with stakeholders within your organization but also understanding what the options are that are out there with Drupal how do you engage the right developers the right partners and how do you make good decisions when it comes to Drupal so these are all things I think that ways in which enterprises can take steps or make decisions to help better support Drupal and at the end of the day just remember it's all about the chocolate and the peanut butter, the Reese's Cup they go great together so with that for those who didn't contribute ideas during the discussion I'm happy to take questions but I also have more Reese's Cups Ray do you have some as well feel free if you want some Reese's Cups you're welcome to come up and grab some so I'm happy to take some questions so I'm a back-end developer a back-end developer for six years I've noticed that a lot of my clients are more enterprise based clients and I was wondering from your perspective if a freelancer wanted to serve the enterprise market what they should specialize in instead of joining some big firm they can just do it themselves so back-end are you doing site building or are you doing custom module development custom module development what role does a freelancer have in serving the enterprise so you'd be surprised at how many organizations are looking for people just like you I think there are organizations that are looking to either contract on an individual basis or hire as employees people who have specific skills in those areas ways in which you might go about doing that I think certainly is just a lot of times there's ads put out employment ads or contracting ads people reaching out trying to find organizations I've also found that so I'm from the Boston area I don't know from where are you from San Francisco Drupal Meetups great place to go because when you get to a meetup you're going to have people coming in and saying I'm just learning about Drupal my company wants to build a site on Drupal but we're struggling with how do we find the resources how do we find the talent at least at the Boston area meetup I've seen that happen numerous times and it's a yep go ahead Ray we don't do it very often but there are a lot of shops with a subcontractor that they can bring in if there was a need they wouldn't have to have a fixed cost that they would need to carry I think the issue for the enterprise providers is always a question of managing risk at some point there was so I think the key idea would find a shop where you're a good match and you don't have to work full time to build a relationship try to meet the need you know the resources to help themselves on an everyday basis let me rephrase my question a little bit so there's a lot of profits in the enterprise market that's where the higher rates are and being a large shop like link reaction or aquia you guys have more resources, more talent more specialty and thus more security as well and you can justify those rates but as a freelancer I think getting into that mix as well or charging those rates is something very attractive for freelancers to do while subcontracting you always got to cut a piece of the pie out of there so it's a little lower so if a freelancer wanted to charge the rates of large firms what specialties or roles do you think they could invest in invincibility I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I