"Drupal for Everyone"

I came across an article today on CMSWire talking about Acquia's, which is a Drupal "distributor" if you will that bundles services and support, 2009 product roadmap. I'm not sure if they actually conducted an interview with Acquia or when the roadmap was announced, but there are a couple interesting points that come out of both the article and the roadmap.

Let me begin by giving props to Acquia for actually posting their roadmaps, I'm sure Kas Thomas over at CMS Watch is all smiles. This is pretty typical for open source products, but Acquia is a little different in that they are not technically open source (gasps)...they took Drupal and locked it down to meet certain upgrade and add on integration requirements, then added in service and support.

The big news here is that Drupal is now for everyone, with the introduction, again I'm not sure when this roadmap was actually published, of Acquia Gardens. They're doing this two ways:  First  is that Drupal, via Acquia, will be offered as a Software-as-a-Service come spring, where they will basically host the application and infrastructure via Amazon's EC2 cloud. And second making it the UI actually usable if you're a non-technical user. On this second point, it's unclear if the initial implementation will still be the Drupal developer only standard or if just adding additional modules once you're up and running will be of the easy non-technical user point-and-click variety.

So to bring this all back to my title of this post, "Drupal for Everyone", I'm sure all the die hard Drupalists...Drupalers...Drupalaniacs, we'll just call them Drupal enthusiasts, are just ecstatic to see that the product that they know and love is now actually accessible. I get it, they're trying to make this a mass market initiative, but it comes across a little pejorative to your core, as well as assumes that it wasn't actually usable before. This thing is driven by your community and biting the hand that feeds you isn't a good start for building this into the main stream.

I also find it interesting that mass marketing this means offering it as a SaaS. Full disclosure, I work for a software company that is also delivered as a SaaS so I obviously have my bias here, but this is definitely the right thing to do. Taking the infrastructure management and software patching, maintenance, upgrades, etc. out of the mix is definitely an attractive offering for a business user or marketer.

The last thing I want to leave you with is a question that I struggle with a little bit...is Acquia Gardens really a true SaaS, or is it rather a traditional ASP? Remember that Acquia has just taken open source Drupal and built a commercially available CMS framework around it that they have vetted, so it won't break when you start adding the other modules available from Acquia. And they will of course still offer the standard installed version of Drupal, for a time anyway. So is this more like a Web design shop taking an installed version of Reddot and then hosting it themselves and calling it SaaS or has this been built from the ground up, multi-tenant, et al to be a SaaS? It's and interesting question. It may be a matter of semantics or looking at it from a business model vs. a technical perspective, but one  could really argue either way with equal fervor...and I'm sure it will be out there on the computernets.

Comments

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[Dries Butyaert]

I'm the founder of Drupal, and the co-founder and CTO of Acquia.

I wanted to point out that that Acquia Drupal, Acquia's distribution is 100% Open Source. Unlike many other Open Source companies, there is no "enterprise version" with special features, and there are no special or closed source modules that are only available to Acquia customers. Your post suggests that there might be, so I wanted to clarify that.

In other words, there is only one version of Acquia Drupal, and it is made available from acquia.com free of charge under the GPL. Everyone is encouraged to use it, with or without having a commercial support contract from Acquia. Technically, it is 100% Open Source.

The reason we are working on Acquia Gardens is not because Drupal is broken. The reason is that many individuals and organizations want a killer web site, but have no idea that Drupal even exists. Even if they did hear about Drupal, few non-technical people succeed in installing and hosting a Drupal site. That is just the way it is -- installing Apache, MySQL, PHP and Drupal is non-trivial if you are not a technical person.

So in much the same way that Wordpress.com and Ning make it easy for people to start blogging or set up a social network, Acquia Gardens will provide an on-ramp for people to experience the awesome power of Drupal.

A fundamental tenet of our strategy is the freedom to grow, migrate, or leave. We believe that site owners should be able to start with Acquia Gardens and migrate their site of Acquia Gardens if they need more features, or to their own hosting provider if they prefer. To make that possible, you'll be able to export your Acquia Gardens site -- both the data _and_ the code. Not just the data. The exported code will be 100% Open Source.

There is a lot of work ahead to implement this strategy, but the groundwork is already in place. We can't wait to tell and show you more -- at the right time. Thanks for your article, Chris. We're happy to see that you take notice of our work.

PS: Drupal has had built-in multi-tenant / multi-site support for over 6 years.

[Rob Rose]

Dries,
Hey there - thanks for participating in the discussion. We're big fans for sure. And congratulations on all the success. I wanted just add to the discussion here - and point out a couple of clarifications.

The point that I believe Chris is making is not that there are different versions of Acquia Drupal - but that Acquia Drupal and the raw version of Drupal that I would download from d.o is (and will be) different. It may be that the core is the same - but Acquia Drupal (quite appropriately) comes with the already configured and supported modules, the "phone home" code and "code detection" to make sure that Acquia can stay in the loop for support and potential security holes. I don't think you're saying that if I install some random module I find on the Interwebz that breaks a supported module that this will be covered in the Acquia support plan.

Also, multi-site capability is much different than true multi-tenancy. I understand that you can run multiple sites off the same instance of Drupal (most CMS's can). However, true-multi tenancy is at the heart of SaaS. All CrownPeak customers, for example, run off the same code-base. I don't think you're saying that all Acquia Gardens customers will run off the same instance of Drupal? You may have an elegant way of upgrading all those instances - but I think you'd agree that it's just a different architecture.

For example:
http://drupal.org/node/184688

I have to agree with WebDev here. It's just different. Not better per se - but different.

The reason we like to point it out - is because there's still confusion in the customer mind when they have a web development shop host Drupal - and they call it SaaS. It's not. Installed software is installed software - whether or not it's installed at a local shop or the machine under your desk. You still have to upgrade it, the OS, PHP etc... That's the true difference.

Hope you're having fun coming over to the "dark side" of venture funded companies. And hope you're enjoying Sigma - they've been great for us. You guys are doing a great job.

Cheers,

~rr
Rob Rose
VP Marketing & Strategy
CrownPeak

[Dries Buytaert]

The Acquia support plans cover all Drupal modules, not just those that are in Acquia Drupal. We also support custom modules or any module that you found on the "Interwebz".

Using Drupal multi-site, all sites run of the same code base (i.e. only one physical copy of the source code on disk), either with their own database tables or with (partially) shared database tables.

If you are on Acquia Gardens, Acquia will do the upgrade of your Drupal site, the OS, PHP, etc. It's "Drupal as a Service", and because Drupal is software, I'd call it SaaS.

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