Dries Buytaert

Drupal.org recently featured a detailed use case about InterMedia Outdoors switching to Drupal. InterMedia Outdoors boasts a network of 16 websites, a portfolio of 15 magazines, 25 market-leading television productions, 2 syndicated radio shows, and more.

What the use case didn't mention is that they are migrating off of FatWire, a proprietary web content management system (WCMS) that is Forrester's current poster child in the Q2 2009 Forrester Wave for "Web Content Management For External Sites". To me, that is the most interesting part because it means that Drupal is starting to disrupt traditional web content management systems, including the leading ones.

In other words: CIOs are starting to take notice of Drupal.

Many of the proprietary content management systems are difficult to customize, expensive, hard to set up, and slow to adopt new trends. Contrast that to an Open Source solution like Drupal and you get the exact opposite: all the code is made available, anyone can change it, it is very extensible, well documented, and massively adopted. Developers are plentiful, it is bleeding edge, and best of all, there is no license fee — which matters a great deal in today's economy.

Furthermore, on the business side, Open Source companies get a ton of sales and marketing for free while proprietary vendors presumably have to put more resources into sales and marketing. In other words, Open Source companies should be able to win on all fronts: technology, sales, and marketing. And we do — I see it in the Drupal community every day.

Excited about this event, I reached out to Howard Stevens, the CIO of InterMedia Outdoors. In an e-mail conversation, he asserted the following:

The primary reason that we selected Drupal is the extensive flexibility that it provides us to enhance our sites over time. While we are very excited about the launch of In-Fisherman, we also recognize that it is a work in progress--the digital media landscape is evolving so quickly it was important for us to implement a content management system that enables us to continually improve our sites without the constraint of vendor roadmaps and proprietary code. The transparency of Drupal's source code and engaged developer community ensures that any deficiencies in the code are quickly discovered and remedied, new features can be developed as necessary, and we will always retain the flexibility to keep our sites on the cutting-edge.

While use cases like InterMedia Outdoors are really helpful in convincing CIOs, we need to think about more and different ways to encourage CIOs to abandon their proprietary web content management systems. A common misconception among CIOs is that Open Source solutions require a lot more customization and development than proprietary CMS solutions. Howard Stevens wrote:

One of the hurdles that dissuaded us from implementing Drupal originally was our very small in-house development team. The promise of an out-of-the-box proprietary solution was appealing as it seemingly mitigated the majority of the development risk and complexity. In reality, Drupal was much more effective at helping us manage those risks ...

The reality is that with 4000+ contributed modules, Drupal has access to a lot more pre-built functionality than any proprietary CMS. Additionally, the number of developers who actively develop in Drupal combined with the number of developers who possess the prerequisite skills (and the plethora of published materials on developing in Drupal) greatly outnumbers the skilled resources with knowledge of nearly every proprietary CMS.

The point here, is that CIOs often look at Drupal differently than developers do. It is less about the technology, and more about finding ways to save time and money and to mitigate risks. Personally, I think the combination of commercial-grade support, Drupal distributions, electronic services and a healthy ecosystem of expert Drupal shops are key in removing barriers for CIOs. Other barriers to overcome include lack of a roadmap (I don't want to fix that), licensing issues (increasingly better understood), training and certification, and of course, functional gaps.

Personally, I'm most interested in identifying the functional gaps because closing those is what the Drupal community excels at. Whatever the functionality gaps, I'm confident we'll close them over time. If you're a proprietary vendor, you can't say we didn't gave you an advance warning. ;-)