There was some little reported financial news that came out of Wall Street last month that did not make much traction in the Drupalsphere, but it should – particularly to our partner Acquia and those of us in the open source world. The news was that the darling of commercial open-source business models, Red-Hat, reported that business is good, very good, despite the global economic recession. To capsulate, Red-Hat revenue was up 11%, earnings up 25% share, and the stock price over 45% this year. You see Acquia has long asserted that they aspire to be to Drupal what Red Hat has become to Linux.
Moreover, venture capitalists and investors are always intrigued by organizations, particularly in the technology space, who generate recurring revenue streams (i.e. subscriptions), have excellent leadership, and most importantly fill a void within the vertical they work. Universally, companies want two things from vendors – the ability to save time and money. If you don’t believe me then look no further than what Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst himself said when addressing his company’s growth. "Our enterprise customers want to save money in a challenging IT spending environment – they are demanding we offer them new capabilities, efficiencies, and functionality". In my opinion, here is what Red-Hat has done a masterful job at – it has never been about them. It was always about the community and their customers. Incidentally, I once asked a wise, older relative of mine to give me the best piece of advice she ever received…her immediate response was "focus on others, not yourself".
Most importantly, the market has come to value Red-Hat’s services. I would classify Drupal as still a work in progress here, but the signs are encouraging. This is where evangelizing needs to take hold – more case studies, white papers, analyst reports, webinars, certification programs, open-houses, seminars, media coverage, etc. all leads to better credibility and general recognition. Information technology decision makers (i.e. CIOs, Directors, Project Managers, etc.) need validation and precedence that their idea to implement Drupal is not some trendy selection, but one cemented with well-grounded justification – choosing the bigger logo or brand will always be the safe play, but it’s certainly not always the smartest. Dries Buytaert, the co-founder of Acquia and Drupal project lead, recently spoke to this in a blog post. I read with great interest the comments from Mike Veers, who is the former CIO of the respected magazine The Economist, and apparently spearheaded the case for adopting Drupal:
Drupal relies on word of mouth more than anything else for marketing and has done very well on that so far. To take the next step, though, marketing efforts needs to be beefed up. When convincing the editor of The Economist that Drupal was the right choice for Economist.com, I had to do that without the help of a professional sales team. That, in itself, is not a problem, but when a professional sales team from Escenic or FatWire are involved, Drupal pales somewhat. The lack of something as basic as a flyer for people to read shows where Drupal is compared to established players.
In essence, Drupal could be the most amazing content management system (CMS) in the world, but if the brand lacks consumer awareness this is a serious problem. Acquia has taken the first baton, but it must be a concerted effort. Drupal vendors (Mediacurrent included) must continue to quantifiably demonstrate how open-source based solutions are benefiting our customers. When soliciting new business, the best advertising channel will always be showcasing how your firm’s track record has helped others solve similar problems.
While growing pains will inevitably occur, for Drupal to continue its meteoric rise as *the* leader in the CMS space, we must keep our foot on the throttle when it comes to the marketing side of Drupal. The Red Hat financials are telling us that if we can trumpet the virtues of Drupal then the rewards will follow. However, if we just think of marketing activities as an afterthought then we've taken a significant step backwards.
I’d be very interested to hear from you. How critical do you view the marketing of Drupal?
IMHO – the more SN sites are – the better and if they are on different platform – more good. I have to write custom papers about some of them. I reckon, Drupal will soon give Pligg a healthy competition.
I'm way late to this post, but I want to reinforce your thoughts on how important this is. Having spent most of my adult life in the "form over substance" world of marketing (Coca-Cola), I am now in awe of this polar opposite world of Drupal, where we have "substance over form" in spades. The power of brand marketing is huge! If you're a Nike, a Coke, a BMW, etc., you have enough critical mass of economic incentive to fund a professional branding campaign.
The problem here though, is that even if you aggregate the economic incentives of Acquia, Lullabot, Mediacurrent, plus all of us little guys getting the crumbs around the edges, how would you herd these cats into a well-funded, disciplined, well-integrated campaign? Our market structure, while great at collaboratively building out "substance", doesn't seem to lend itself well to hawking the "form".
Amazing! Not clear for me, but, ey i liked the post.
Thanks for the post.
I wholeheartedly agree with you Dave and am really glad to see that Acquia and calibre firms like Development Seed, Phase2, Workhabit and many others have been helping to raise the profile and calibre of Drupal worldwide. Quality design and solid marketing may not feel that important to the pure coder, but it's vital if we want to be taken seriously by those looking for and open source alternative to the proprietary solutions that we're up against.
I agree that marketing Drupal is critical.
I was in a coffee shop the other day, 5 or 6 college students were sitting at the table beside of me and I overhead them talking about building a community site for their club.
I was waiting for a heavenly light to shine down on the big Drupal logo on the back of my laptop but alas it didn't happen. They had no idea about Drupal and were only considering using Wordpress (Buddypress) or Ning.
Overall though I believe Drupal has incredible marketing momentum building up with the drupal.org redesign, some amazing improvements in D7, Acquia Gardens and Lullabot's Buzzr will creative massive awareness of Drupal via easy to start, easy to use Drupal sites, not to mention that DrupalCamps keep growing.
@ James - thanks for sharing your story - yeah, I sort of cringe whenever Wordpress is at top of mind when I talk to people as well. However, I totally agree we have some solid momentum to build on.
Hope to see drupal will always continue to grow as its community
Wish you all the best, drupal
I distinguish Drupal from the more commercially marketed applications on the point that Drupal has so far benefited from organic/natural marketing through word-of-mouth and good reputation, this is essential for any venture to succeed, and is an indispensable foundation for other intentional marketing activities to succeed. Red-Hat built upon the community awareness and reputation of Linux and has built a reputation by supporting Linux (in the general sense of the term). In the Red-Hat/Linux analogy, We cannot compare Red-Hat to Drupal, but rather Linux to Drupal, and Red-Hat to Acquia or any other flavor anyone of us is packaging, deploying, and supporting. Drupal should and will continue to provide the strong community word-of-mouth reputation, and it is upto those of us implementing it to create a market image that will compliment the non-commercial image to strengthen Drupal (GPL + Commercial support).
That said, it is true that without resources to cement the many things that can be said about Drupal, it is difficult for CIO/CTOs to make the case to the powers in their organization for Drupal since word-of-mouth tends to stay within closed/semi-closed communities of geeks (in this case). E.g It is difficult to make the case for a DBMS by telling the CFO that a given system can write to individual cells without locking the table or row, while it is easier to make the case using whitepapers and case studies that talk about speed, agility and cost-savings/TCO
@ Donny - yes, you accurately summarized what needs to take place. My over-riding point is that all of us who have spent in an extended period of time in the Drupal community are already drinking the "cool-aid" - in order to expand, we need to cross pollinate and market with other technology communities (especially college campuses). We need to make the job of adopting Drupal as easy as possible on IT decision makers. I'll paraphrase one of my industry colleagues (Chris at ImageXmedia) who said it well in a conversation I had with him the other week - we need to be going to where they are and not expect them to find us.
Dave, you echo my thoughts. Drupal is at that difficult point when it's poised to grow beyond its original audience of developers and techno-enthusiasts. I'm sure you're familiar with the "chasm theory" of technology, illustrated in the graphic at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Technology-Adoption-Lifecycle.png -- it posits that this is the most perilous moment in a technology's lifecycle, as its originators don't understand the needs of its later adopters.
Marketing, in its many forms, helps to bridge that chasm -- but it's not all, and (done poorly) could alienate the very people who created the technology in the first place. Dries' involvement with Acquia, while continuing to be active in Drupal core, is perhaps the biggest "glue" between those two communities.
He was smart to get people involved at Acquia *who aren't themselves technologists*. You can't fake membership in a community, much as many technologists erroneously think they can. Drupal's original audience can only push so far: Now its waiting audience must pull it.
@ Tom - yes, "Crossing the Chasm" is on my bookshelf and a must read for any technology entrepreneur. I'd also recommend anything by James Collis, especially "Built to Last." The second round of Acquia funding is obviously a healthy sign that investors are liking what they are seeing so far.
Dave made a lot of valuable comments, especially about educating the public about open source and Drupal. This is certainly part of Acquia's plans with our second round of financing. Besides that, I've also outlined 9 other initiatives that are core to our goals for the company and Drupal in general:
http://www.collegemogul.com/content/acquias-8-million-series-b-10-plans-...
Let's shoot for doing better than Red Hat.
Red Hat is widely despised by system administrators for its burdensome licensing technology, from what I hear. I know shops with large stacks of servers which have been changed from RHEL licenses to CentOS primarily because of that annoyance. That's a direct revenue loss to Red Hat, isn't it?
Post new comment