At First Light

This week we sponsored and attended the Enterprise 2.0 Conference here in Boston. It was a useful week that produced several interesting insights about how Web 2.0 patterns are being applied inside large organizations.

Apparently last year this show was relatively small and mostly filled with vendors selling stuff to too few interested customers. This year has balanced that out: there were a good number of corporate clients at the show, and they appeared to be quite engaged with the concept of Enterprise 2.0 and hungry to learn more.

We sponsored a small booth in the Demo pavilion to attract potential customers and prospective partners. We had solid traffic all week. Few people coming by our booth had heard of Drupal before, so we spent considerable time educating them about the history and functionality of Drupal. We need to continue to evolve our demos and diagrams to make this process easier and more differentiating. See more on that below.

In addition to staffing our own booth, I spent some time checking out the competition to benchmark our messaging and functionality. I was struck by how thoroughly undifferentiated the pitches were. Everyone was giving essentially the same demo, talking about the same functionality and use cases.

Some of the solutions are delivered through on-premise software. Many were offered as software-as-a-service. A few are available through both. A [very] few are open source, but most of these are corporate-led non-organic open source. Drupal+Acquia was the only fully organic open source project represented.

We need to do more to help Drupal stand out in this messaging monoculture. As I've reflected on this, I think we need to more effectively emphasize the flexibility, agility, and adaptability of Drupal. It is the breadth and depth of the module library and the community behind it that makes Drupal stand out. Drupal is nearly always up to date with the latest trends. It can be adapted to meet a multitude of special situations without lots of custom coding. Not so for most of the solutions I saw at this show. Many of these solutions fall apart when it comes to delivering on the specific requirements of individual teams and internal communities. Things like custom content types, feeds that span multiple content types, and custom views of content are problematic for many of the vendors I spoke with.

This morning I participated on a panel moderated by John Eckman of Optaros. John Newton of Alfresco and Bob Bickel of Ringside Networks and talked about open source as applied to Enterprise 2.0. The audience was very engaged, the energy level was high, and truth was spoken. We took plenty of jabs at proprietary software models and highlighted the ways that commercial backers like Acquia, Alfresco, and Ringside Networks can close the expectation gap between enterprise customers and open source software. Kathleen Reidy of The 451 Group has an insightful write-up about the panel.

A photostream from the conference is located here.