A Dormant Drupal Opportunity?
Gartner, one of the leading technology industry analyst firms, published their list of the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008 back in October 2007 at their Gartner Symposium/ITXpo event. I was at the event, but somehow missed the press release. Karthikeyan over at Seeking Alpha just posted a summary that brought it to my attention.
The good news is that Social Software category is on the list. This category includes many different point technologies including blogs, wikis, tagging, bookmarking, and social networking. Here’s what they have to say about it:
Social Software. Through 2010, the enterprise Web 2.0 product environment will experience considerable flux with continued product innovation and new entrants, including start-ups, large vendors and traditional collaboration vendors. Expect significant consolidation as competitors strive to deliver robust Web 2.0 offerings to the enterprise. Nevertheless social software technologies will increasingly be brought into the enterprise to augment traditional collaboration.
The great thing about Drupal is that it does all of this AND also does traditional web content publishing/management. It’s not blog software with wikis bolted on, nor is it wiki software with blogs bolted on, or a web publishing/content management system with wikis and blogs bolted on. It’s an architecture for doing all of these and more, mixing/mashing them however you want. I think the genius of what Dries and the community have done is to reduce all of the aspects of social software to their core DNA: content nodes and membership, and then build a platform that could be infinitely extended to allow the assembly of almost any style of online social interaction.
So when Gartner says there will be “consolidation” I think they are correct. But mergers and acquisitions of proprietary companies is not the only way that consolidation happens. In many ways, Drupal is already there from an architectural perspective. And it has a huge community and behind it. Those are massive advantages.
But there are a few obstacles holding Drupal back from becoming Gartner’s poster child for social software. Drupal is often pigeon-holed as yet another CMS, which is a 20th century term that completely undersells what Drupal is capable of. I’ve asked my peers at Acquia to stop referring to Drupal as a CMS because it is so limiting. In my view, Drupal is a social publishing system that can help workgroups/teams collaborate and help companies build powerful communities around their content and products. That’s way more than an old school CMS. How we talk about Drupal shapes how we think about what’s possible.
But it’s more than terminology - it’s about ecosystem. Gartner says that “social software technologies will increasingly be brought into the enterprise to augment traditional collaboration”. But who exactly is going to bring in the social software solutions built on Drupal? How many Drupal shops do you see out there doing projects for internal collaboration for Fortune 500 companies? A few, but I don’t think I see as many as I would expect.
My guess is that one big reason for the focus on external facing sites is that there there has been a lot of easy money out there for doing brochure-ware web sites and community makeovers with Drupal. Perhaps that party will continue to go on for a long time. I hope so. But Garter is pointing the way to another opportunity for social software for team collaboration inside organizations.
Microsoft is making $1B per year in software alone with Sharepoint in the internal team collaboration market. And their partner community (their equivalent of Drupal shops) is making even more money as described in this CRN article where it says the following:
Sharepoint offers a long-term revenue stream for partners, with deals averaging around $125,000 in services revenue, ranging from around $20,000 for small and midmarket projects, to more than $2 million for large enterprise deployments, according to Patton.
“Not only are the [Sharepoint] deal economics good, but there’s a relatively small upfront investment in training, sales and marketing needed, which means fast profitability,” said Patton.
It’s not atypical in the proprietary software world for the service provider channel to make 5-7X software revenues. So that would mean about $5-7B going to Microsoft partners building Sharepoint solutions for clients.
I know, I know - Drupal isn’t Sharepoint and Sharepoint isn’t Drupal. But companies appear to be ready to open their wallets to help people collaborate internally, Gartner is calling attention to social software as a way to do it, and Drupal has most of what’s needed.
So, what do YOU think?
1. Do you think we should put the CMS term to bed?
2. Would it be possible to grab some of that team collaboration social software market opportunity for the Drupal community?
3. Why isn’t there already a billion dollar Drupal services ecosystem for team collaboration? What’s missing?
I look forward to seeing the comments.
In 2006, I wrote this: http://buytaert.net/sharepoint-2007.
There is a lot of good stuff in that post and the comments that follow.
I think the problem with completely putting the term CMS to rest is that there really aren't many terms available that best describes what software like Drupal is all about. Your mention of SharePoint in this post is well suited for this discussion as I really see SharePoint and Drupal capable of the same functions behind the corporate firewall. But even Microsoft has had a tough time describing what SharePoint is to their customers.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.
Whew, you and I know what Microsoft is trying to say, but try describing that to the boss! However, I do think their slogan for SharePoint captures the heart of Web 2.0 (and could just as easily be describing Drupal), "Connecting people, process, and information".
The problem with describing Drupal as "social software" is that the enterprise is just as confused with that term as it has been with CMS. Andrew McAfee, Harvard, is a big Enterprise 2.0 advocate and has been an advocate for businesses to adopt the technologies that software such as Drupal has to offer to the enteprise. You get a sense from his writings that this is an uphill battle for bringing social and collaboration software to the enterprise, but a battle that can be won. One of the most inspirational posts I've seen from him is The Ties that Find and it gave me my own thoughts for my own blog post.
So no, I don't think the term CMS is holding Drupal back. What I do think though is we're just not sure how to throw the other terms out there that make sense to non-IT managers and financial decision makers who need to buy off implementing social software within the enterprise. I'm starting to wonder though if we just need to drop the term "content" and describe it in the broader "management system". For the business people, Drupal becomes a management system to meet your team collaboration and content management needs. For the external Web 2.0 folks, Drupal becomes a management system to meet your social networking needs. I don't know...we have to do better...but as I have said before the problem isn't with the term CMS but the fact we don't know how best to describe Drupal when the sum of all its parts are put together.
I think though, this confusion in the enterprise isn't going to last long and this is the right opportunity for Drupal! For companies that don't want to make a significant investment in something like SharePoint because they're unsure how it can help them, Drupal is a fantastic alternative to SharePoint. Since SharePoint is geared to meet the needs of the enterprise, you have to wonder how well suited it will be to meet those smaller groups within the enterprise with demographics or an IT culture that doesn't fit the corporate mold. I think most large organizations now recognize while they need to support the stable well established enterprise software...they have to allow for the "cutting edge" applications to also be explored within their own organization. That's where I see Drupal making headway into organizations...and if you insist as "social software".
For my own organization, I'm actually advocating the use of both SharePoint and Drupal. I really see SharePoint well suited for taking on the collaboration and content management needs at our national and regional offices. But our field offices have needs that are unique to the middle and upper levels of the organization. Budgeting each field office to have their own SharePoint server is out of the question...so what do you do? You're going to look for alternatives and for me that is Drupal.
In a lot of ways, Drupal can be to SharePoint what BlackBerry has become to Microsoft Exchange. While Drupal can stand on it's own (just as BlackBerry does), it also has the power to coexist with Microsoft's products. Companies are much more willing to be open to open source software such as Drupal, if they know it won't lead them to a dead-end and no way back to the their enterprise applications.
Would the Drupal community be happy with making Drupal more compatible with Microsoft? I'll leave that answer to those that know the answer better than I do. But what about a private company who desires for the business world to apply the best of open source into their applications? Hmmm...
Thanks Bryan. Finding a way to co-exist with Microsoft is always tricky, but it’s worth spending some time to think about it.
“The great thing about Drupal is that it does all of this (minus social networking)”
Why do you say “minus social networking”? Drupal has tons of social networking modules and powers many SN sites.
Michelle
My bad. I wasn’t aware of the modules you describe. I’m very glad to hear that. I’ll correct the post.
Yep, pretty much everything you need to build a MySpace or Facebook is there. If you have a moment, take a peek at http://socnet.shellmultimedia.com . It only has a fraction of the modules installed so far but gives an idea of what Drupal can do in this area.
Michelle
Good Article. Funny enough, when I am demonstrating the power of Drupal to people in my industry it is often compared to Sharepoint. I feel that Drupal has major advantages from a technical standpoint over sharepoint, the main one being that it is open source, and interoperability with other open projects will NEVER be an issue.
I do not think that the branding of CMS to Drupal is holding Drupal deployment back, but instead, the Brand Drupal is not as well known as us geeks think it is. Yes, those of us who work with it and live in this Drupal bubble may find it hard to believe, but many people don’t know what Drupal is. Whereas, if you tag Microsoft in front of the word Sharepoint, you immediately get brand recognition, and people fall into a comfort zone, as blind as that comfort zone may be. The key to Drupal becoming a platform, for not just social networking sites, but all database driven dynamic Web 2.0 content is to have more presence in the Business arena.
I am hoping, with the growth of Drupal consulting businesses, and of course, the creation of Acquia, people will know what you are talking about when you say, “Drupal can change your business, want to know how?”
I think that the term CMS still has some life left to it since its commonality brings in new persons, like myself, through research and inquiry. In a couple years the term will garner a new definition that is in reference to the new term.
It is possible to get some of the social software market without question but it’ll take some heavy duty marketing. The persons installing SharePoint 2007 now are the ones that are already ‘married’ to Microsoft. Great example is my IT manager boss loves SP but has no clue whats under the hood and what it takes to keep it running. He comes from using Microsoft products for the past 10 years or so, specifically Microsoft Exchange. Microsoft’s legacy in the market plus the psychology of ‘if you charge for something people will pay’ is the only reason why SP is “successful”.
What’s missing for Drupal—- this is just my opinion—- is corporate presence. But this has changed. Acquia is the best step forward. Think of it in terms like a group of techies holding a Drupal flag. In the corporate eyes, that doesn’t matter until a building is flying the Drupal flag.
Harvard, is a big Enterprise 2.0 advocate and has been an advocate for businesses to adopt the technologies that software such as Drupal has to offer to the enteprise. You get a sense from his writings that this is an uphill battle for bringing social and collaboration software to the enterprises
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