selling drupal to the enterprise

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Selling Drupal to The Enterprise(or, how to not get your ass kicked by Adobe)

@dwalper

Director of Business

Development at Myplanet Digital

Hey look, it’s me!

First, what is this “Enterprise” business?

An Enterprise Application Is…

1. Large. Multi-user, multi-developer, multi-component, lots of data, lots of integration points.

2. Business-Oriented. Meets the needs of the business, encodes business processes and logic.

3. Mission Critical. Can’t go down unless Amazon does. Easy maintenance, monitoring, admin.

You’ll need to know…• Its business goals.• How soon it must be delivered.• Its budget.• How many people will develop,

test, and maintain it.• How many concurrent users it must

support.• The importance of performance

and ease of use.• The hardware it must run on.• Where it will be deployed.• What security is required.• How long you expect to use it.

A brief aside on agile…

Why aren’t you doing this yet?

Why Agile

1. Flexibility. If you thought SMB’s were bad at knowing what they want…

2. Communication. Constant weekly/bi-weekly demos keep up momentum & visibility.

3. Speed. We’re usually 3x faster than internal teams at delivery.

Who does Drupal REALLY compete with?

Who Drupal Competes With

1. Ektron2. Adobe CQ53. Sitecore4. OpenText5. Clickability6. Site.com7. Etc.

Adobe Rules The Roost

Who Drupal DOESN’T Compete With

1. Wordpress2. Joomla!3. DotNetNuke4. Your 14-year-old

nephew’s hand-coded HTML & CSS (but I’m sure he’s really good!)

If you act like these are your competitors, you will lose

And now…

TIME FOR ZE CHARTS

The insight• Selling Drupal is 95%

about the human element• In the enterprise, you

need a sponsor who can guide you through internal politics

• Ideally he/she is already bought into open source and/or Drupal

The Insight• You need to proactively

address potential objections.

• If you’re already on the defensive you’ll probably lose.

• If you can’t address the concerns yourself, bring in a partner who can.

The Insight• You need to explain how

Drupal will help to accomplish these goals.

• Adobe does wicked, flashy demos of these features. Never be in a position of competing on demos.

A digression on RFPs

RFPs Suck

5 Tips For Avoiding RFP Hell

1. If it looks like a setup, it is.

2. Make sure it explicitly mentions open source.

3. Don’t get cornered into demoing Drupal as a “product”.

4. If it makes you fill out a “functional requirements” chart, run.

5. Just freakin’ avoid if at all possible.

NOW BACK TO ZE CHARTS!

Drupal Chops

Actually, let’s digress again into WEM… oh, sorry, “CXM”*…

*Thanks for inventing yet another stupid acronym, Forrester…

Wait… Drupal has been doing this sh** for YEARS!

For example…

1. Solr / Acquia Search2. Integration with

Omniture, Google Analytics, whatever.

3. Drupal Commons.4. Google Website

Optimizer, Visual Website Optimizer integration.

5. MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc.

It’s important to fess up to what Drupal sucks at…

Some Areas Where Drupal Sucks

1. Out-of-the-box functionality

2. Content editor/administrator experience.

3. Page-building experience.

4. Overabundance of choice for even basic things (WYSIWYG editor?)

5. Old-school architecture.

Some Areas Where Drupal Is Great

1. Tons of integrations.2. Huge community.3. Commercially supported

(Acquia)

Looking to the future…

“The goal of Drupal 8's Web Service Initiative is to make Drupal equally good at outputting data as XML, JSON and other non-HTML formats, to expose Drupal's functionality through a RESTful interface, but also for Drupal to better support different page layouts when delivering HTML pages to different devices.”