[Evangelism] The State of Drupal

Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.] ken.wasetis at contextualcorp.com
Mon Nov 23 14:25:15 UTC 2009


Steve,

Thanks for the valuable write-up.  Following up on Matt's point, why 
couldn't the 'Plone Foundation' be the organization/vendor rated by the 
analysts?  Let them analyze the staying power of the Foundation, the 
project, the CMS - that has to be a strength of Plone that we're not 
capitalizing on enough.

The downside of not using a Plone vendor/integrator might be that the 
analyst might have a difficult time estimating the annual revenues, 
number of employees, headquarters and other demographics/metrics they 
normally include in their reviews.

I suspect that to gain coverage by the analysts, though, there will be 
some 'analysis fee' or some such fee paid to Gartner, Forrester, 
whomever we want to have cover Plone.  If it's not too huge an amount 
(and we could take collections for those interested in coverage), and if 
there is enough interest in having Plone compared in the same reports 
(it should be, IMHO), then we will have lifted the bar for Plone.

If others agree, we can write a message to the Board to investigate and 
go through the proper channels/process.

-Ken


Matt Hamilton wrote:
>
> On 23 Nov 2009, at 08:07, Dylan Jay wrote:
>
> All great points, and agree with you... one point specifically I have 
> been noticing recently...
>
>>>
>>> 8) The party line on Acquia is that what's good for Acquia and Dries 
>>> is good for Drupal. I saw not a hint of discomfort with that.
>>
>> I think this is one of the most important points. Maybe it won't 
>> last, and maybe the community will suffer long term by Acquia making 
>> lots of money? Maybe Drupal will end up being vendor opensource with 
>> all its downsides? Who knows.
>> In the medium term, as an Plone development company, I think Acquia 
>> gives Drupal an unfair advantage. Just the other day we had a very 
>> large organisation say they went with a proprietary solution because 
>> "we can't sue Plone" and decided this before we could even present to 
>> them or explain that opensource means you can purchase a plone 
>> solution from an integrator and then sue them if it goes wrong. We 
>> have liability insurance :)
>> Acquia gives Drupal the perception of size and credibility to those 
>> who don't know any better. We can dismiss these risk adverse decision 
>> makers of big organisations but I think those people matter. I agree 
>> with Dries when he says "We should all agree that at the end of the 
>> day, success should be measured by the number of people working with 
>> Drupal, not by the number of people working on Drupal". Plone kicks 
>> Drupal and a lot of proprietary CMS butt, feature for feature but 
>> Acquia makes Drupal easier to sell by giving the perception of 
>> security. Anything we can do to help sell plone is good for plone 
>> otherwise we risk being "irrelevant".
>
>
> ... Acquia have shown up on a few 'Magic Quadrant' type lists from 
> Analysts. Not Drupal, but Acquia. Now Plone is not listed there at all 
> as it is just an Open Source 'project' and not a 'vendor' in the 
> traditional analyst sense. That said I think that is an advantage ;) 
> but I'm sure potential buyeers might not.
>
> Someone recently pointed out that the role of most Gartner-type 
> analysts is not to comment on the suitablity of the CMS to your 
> particular organisation, but to just comment on whether the vendor is 
> going to be around next year or not. Hence why 'Plone' is not on those 
> lists as it is not a 'vendor', but it does make me think we do lose 
> out a bit on mindshare as a result.
>
> Its a tough one as I agree what you say about Acquia making Drupal 
> easier to sell.... but on the other hand I don't want to ever end up 
> with a 'Plone Acquia'.
>
> -Matt
>




More information about the Evangelism mailing list