[Evangelism] The State of Drupal

Dylan Jay djay at pretaweb.com
Wed Nov 25 00:37:14 UTC 2009


On 25/11/2009, at 2:26 AM, Dylan Jay wrote:

> On 24/11/2009, at 9:46 PM, Matt Hamilton wrote:
>
>>
>> On 24 Nov 2009, at 04:36, Dylan Jay wrote:
>>
>>>> ... 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.
<SNIP>
>>>
>>
>> All makes sense. I guess this is what I've been thinking about  
>> recently. The fact that the customer/integrator/vendor model that  
>> most commercial CMSs use just doesn't quite fit with the way the  
>> Plone community works. Or rather the Plone community doesn't quite  
>> fit with it, and hence the whole buying process around buying a CMS  
>> is different and often doesn't fit the existing model that  
>> customers might be used to.

All I had to do was scroll downs Dries blog and he tells us exactly  
how they did it.

http://buytaert.net/gartner-puts-drupal-in-visionaries-quadrant

First Drupal is in the quadrant not Acquia but the reason its there is  
a great deal to do with Acquia. What the analysts think is important:

'Here is what Nikos Drakos, Research Director at Gartner wrote about  
Drupal's pomotion: "Drupal is in the Visionaries quadrant because of  
its use of the open source model to drive adoption and popularity,  
while providing enterprise services via organizations such as Acquia.  
Its strong content-centric, community and web application foundation  
is being rapidly extended with hundreds of modules, including many for  
collaboration and social interaction support."'

Dries opinion on why it's important: "Plus, large organizations that  
are about to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a website  
project, don't want to make the wrong technology choice. Instead,  
those large businesses call Gartner, or any of the other analyst  
firms, to get advice on what technologies to adopt."

How they did it:
"One of the things we've been doing since the inception of Acquia, is  
talking to analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, and the 451group  
about Drupal, and all of Drupal's successes. Almost all of that work  
is carried out by Acquia's marketing people, but I've been in several  
analyst calls myself."

Ie, paid marketing people who are lobbying analysts and ringing them  
constantly to develop relationships. ideas anyone?





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