5 things every CMS vendor can learn from Drupal and Acquia

If there is one winner in the CMS industry in recent years, it is Drupal. No other system is more widely used in the enterprise segment and has also managed to convince formerly critical companies of the possibilities of open source software. Below I have listed 5 points that I think are essential for the success of Drupal and Acquia.

(Reading time 4 minutes – English version here)

Symbiosis between business and community

I always find it amazing how Acquia/Drupal manages the balancing act between community and commercial unit. Here are two statements from a business and community perspective:

• “Acquia has been instrumental in leveraging its associated Drupal community to accelerate product development and help close the gap on some of its competitors. While other communities can show a high degree of activity, Acquia has helped bring focus to some of that activity to enhance its overall offering.”

• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management, October 2014

 

“To speak of Drupal 8 as “Acquia’s software” is more than wrong and unfair to the vast majority of developers who are not with Acquia.”

Christian Ziegler in his comment on my article about Drupal 8 from January

Of course, it is not the case that Drupal and Acquia form a single entity in purely statutory terms. But the perception in the market (decision-makers) is different: Drupal is Acquia and Acquia is Drupal. Acquia plays with this very skillfully, considers very carefully in all publications which wording is appropriate and keeps the boundaries fluid.

With good reason: if Acquia were “just” an integrator with a few additional products, they would probably not be relevant for Gartner. Smile, for example, is bigger than an integrator and we at AOE are well on the way to operating in similar dimensions soon. On the other hand, if Acquia were only commercially oriented, it would not be possible to maintain such a large community. This balancing act is a fine art and probably works well precisely because the community and commerce share the same integrator.

The current discussions about the future of the TYPO3 Association show just how difficult it is for a group to find its bearings in this area of tension between FOSS and today’s open source business model.

Vision

CMS as we know it from the last 10 years is becoming less and less important. Acquia recognized this early on and has continuously created additional products in recent years that support its vision:

“We’re going after a big dream to become the preferred platform for what has been called the “pivot point of many enterprise tech stacks” — the technologies that permit organizations to deliver on the promises of exceptional digital customer experiences from an agile, open, resilient platform.”

Dries Buytaert in the 2014 Acquia Retrospective

So it’s not primarily about CMS (even if most pitches still sell it that way), but about becoming the preferred platform for all of a company’s digital needs in the medium term. This means that in addition to content and customer experience, functionality will become much more important. Not just the ability to create functionality on your own platform, but also to integrate it from external sources.

In fact, with Drupal, Acquia Lift and Acquia Cloud, Acquia Commerce, etc., it is very possible to build comprehensive platforms in many areas. Not all of the features described by Acquia as products are independent software strands, but rather simple module sets for Drupal. This also exists in many other open source CMS. From a sales perspective, however, it is very clever to present these as products, as this makes the sheer variety of functions tangible for decision-makers (who are only used to “proprietary wording”).

Leader

A leader is essential for all communities, regardless of whether they are social and/or commercial. A good leader motivates on a broad basis, helps out where qualitative or quantitative bottlenecks arise and ensures that everyone in the community feels comfortable and makes progress. And they make decisions when the community is lost in arguments and a standstill is imminent.

Such a leader is not a king, but a figure of integration and a point of reference for people with different views but a common goal. Look around you: Companies and projects with such a leader usually function better than communities without one. It’s not that this leader makes all the decisions. On the contrary. It maintains a decision-making process that is as open-ended as possible (within the framework of the strategy) and gives the various stakeholder groups a voice where necessary.

 

External Funding

Acquia has never been afraid of funding: USD 118.5 million in 7 financing rounds from 10 investors speaks for itself. Many an open source (CMS) manufacturer would probably be much further along if they had not committed themselves to the sometimes rather romantic and idealistic idea of self-financing. What does Acquia need this money for? Dries gives a nice answer to this in the 2014 Retrospective:

It’s not like Tom Erickson and I enjoy raising money, but building and expanding a sales and marketing team is notoriously difficult and requires big investments. At the same time, we’re building and supporting the development of multiple products in parallel.

And regarding Development / Drupal 8:

We contributed significantly to Drupal 8 and helped it to achieve beta status; of the 513 critical Drupal 8 bugs fixed in 2014, Acquia’s Office of the CTO helped fix 282 of them. We also funded work on the Drupal Module Upgrader to automate much of the work required to port modules from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.

We don’t want to give the impression that most of the funding went to Drupal development. But Acquia is ready to overcome critical points and challenges in Drupal if necessary. If I were a decision-maker on the customer side, this would put my mind at ease with regard to my potential investment in a Drupal platform.

 

Strategy before technology

Time and again, we see that NIH and code infatuation hinder the development of what is in itself a great product. Drupal/Acquia has made a strategically correct decision by choosing Symfony, as they can benefit from the spread of Symfony. In dozens of conversations with decision makers about their future CMS platform, the advantage of this decision is already apparent. The majority of people are waiting to evaluate Drupal 8 because they already have Symfony-based software in their organization. Whether this makes a lot of technical sense is not relevant for the time being. For most of them, it is already a great advantage not to have to explain a new technology to the board again.

I don’t think Drupal should serve as the sole showcase for other CMS vendors. They still lose enough pitches because they do a lot worse than their competitors in many areas. Overall, however, Drupal/Acquia is doing a lot of things quite well and it is worthwhile as a CMS manufacturer, especially as a proprietary one, to take a look at it.