[consulting] Successful large enterprise deployments of Drupal

[Michael Haggerty]

Heh heh. That is a completely different question.

Fortune 100 companies want to know:

A) How the product scales
B) Where they can get benchmarks and support for the product
C) The product's capabilities

In that order. There are a myriad of ways to answer these questions.

The things Drupal has going for it are:

A) There are no licensing fees attached to it.
B) It runs on a LAMP platform.
C) What it does, it does very well. The underlying architecture is adaptable
for rapid application development, the modular framework allows the addition
of about anything under the sun, the out-of-the-box functionality is
adaptable to a variety of business situations.

What I find people tend to have problems with is:

A) The license is GPL, which carries restrictions on how products based on
Drupal can be distributed.
B) There is no idemnity offered if something goes wrong.
C) There are no definitive answers for how Drupal scales as there are with
some commercial content management products.

Over Thanksgiving, I was talking with a relative who runs clinical trials
throughout North America and Europe. They need a content management solution
and are about to spend $750k in licensing fees on Documentum. I told her
about CivicSpace and how it works. She said that is great, it does exactly
what they are looking for, but they are not going with anything licensed
under the GPL.

Talked to another relative who works for Ford motor company. They are all
about forward deployments, and he uses a PDA as his primary computer. He
said unless a product has 4 or 5 years of benchmarks behind it, they don't
even look at it as an enterprise solution. The risk for not being able to
fix something that is not working properly are too high to consider less
mature platforms.

Thank you,
Michael Haggerty
Managing Partner
Trellon, LLC
http://www.trellon.com
(p) 301-577-6162
(c) 240-643-6561
(f) 413-691-9114
(aim) haggerty321 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: puregin [mailto:puregin at puregin.org] 
> Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 1:10 PM
> To: mhaggerty at trellon.com; A list for Drupal consultants and 
> Drupal service/hosting providers
> Subject: Re: [consulting] Successful large enterprise 
> deployments of Drupal
> 
> 
> On 13-Dec-2005, at 11:50 AM, Michael Haggerty wrote:
> 
> Hi Michael,
> 
> Thanks for your detailed, interesting and informative reply...
> 
> > Large is kind of a subjective term. It could refer to the amount of 
> > traffic on a site or the complexity of the applications running 
> > within.
> 
> You're right - I wasn't very clear.
> 
>       I meant large in the sense of 'lots of employees' .
> 
> The issue is that such 'large' organizations are often 
> conservative in their IT decisions, hence like to know that a 
> given software solution has been successfully implemented in 
> similar situations.
> 
> I suppose you could say I'm interested in the question of how 
> can Drupal be presented to Fortune 1000 companies.
> 
> Cheers, Djun
>