[consulting] Successful large enterprise deployments of Drupal

[Zack Rosen]

> 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.

This is open-source FUD that will eventually* die taking the  
organizations who still believe in it down with it.  In the meantime  
the best route to combat this (lack of) argument IMO is to line up  
all the 'enterprise' peers of this organization and have them shout  
the praises of open-source and Drupal.

> 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.

We need two things
1) Well written case studies
2) Solid benchmarks

The first can happen pretty easily IMO.  Simply a matter of  
interviewing high profile current users of Drupal (Air America, The  
Onion) and writing it up and posting it to Drupal.org.  The second is  
going to take an engineering budget or a resourceful volunteer.  
Michael, I was under the impression you did some benchmarking for  
BetterCa - any chance we could get these compiled and posted?

* may take a while....

-Zack
>
>
>
>> -----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
>>
>>
>
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