Drupal for the enterprise, enterprise Drupal; however you want to frame it, the conversation continues to evolve as more and more “Enterprise” organizations move to Drupal.
Before I go too far, let me start by putting a framework around how we define enterprise. According to Wikipedia, enterprise content management system is defined as:
software implemented as a web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and essential web maintenance functions..
Traditionally that has been large, proprietary systems with heavy customization to achieve the desired results. Thanks in large part to a down global economy last year; many organizations were forced to take a look at ways to cut expenses and numerous organizations chose to opt-out on over-priced, proprietary CMS platforms. This opened the door for open-source platforms like Drupal to begin answering the call for a better enterprise class CMS solution, and in 2009 we saw WhiteHouse.gov, Intel, The Emmys and The Grammy’s all make the switch.
So what now?
The Drupal community realizes that there is a huge opportunity and there are literally hundreds of articles out there about the push to take Drupal to the enterprise. I have to wonder, how many agencies, shops, freelancers and whoever else you can think of, have the process and expertise to deliver projects of such size and scope? Don't get me wrong there are some great shops of all sizes out there, but when it comes down to it, there's probably only a handful that are going to be able to properly execute to the enterprise scale. Here at L10, we've taken major strides in being prepared for Enterprise
Drupal Development by putting together a proven, results driven development process. As well, we've institutionalized across all clients the necessary dev and staging protocols so that as we continue to move towards larger projects we're already working in a process that is necessary for the enterprise. I'll be honest it hasn't been easy and frankly there have been some headaches getting there, but I can already see the long term value that this level of insurance provides our clients, enterprise or not.
