contentmanagement

"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.

The boy who cried consolidation

If there is one thing that defines the Web Content Management space even more than the excesses of the dot bomb, it's the relative lack of consolidation that has happened over the years. Yes, every year or two a "big" vendor gets acquired by another company looking to build out it's ECM promise: EMC and Documentum in 2003; Open Text and Gauss in 2005; Hummingbird and RedDot in 2005; IBM and FileNet in 2006; Oracle and Stellent in 2006 and then of course the surprising Autonomy and Interwoven just last month. But what's even more surprising to me is for every Interwoven out there, there are a dozen more Cushy CMS' popping up...so there's never really any real consolidation at all, it's actually more of a fragmentation.

CMSWatch's new content technology vendor subway map is a perfect example of this. We'll set aside the, shall we say, odd representation of information here and just look as the number of WCM vendors that they represent from last year to the this...I count 30 from this year as apposed 18 from last year. By no means is that a scientific or reliable measure of the amount of vendors in the space, it's probably a more visual aesthetic than anything else, but it does give you a sense of the direction we're going. Another off-the-cuff barometer that I've noticed is on the tradeshow circuit. A few years ago I could rattle off the 10-15 vendors that would be exhibiting at Gilbane, and tell you who would be giving away the schwag at their booth. Now I couldn't tell you who a quarter of the new vendors are let alone how to pronounce the company name.

I know this makes me sound like a grumpy old man yearning for the days when men were men, but that's not my point at all. This is good news, there's enough food out there to support our ecosystem, and even given the economic downslide things to look a little brighter on the WCM side of things. Well except for Vignette, these guys are actually hoping that the wolf actually comes.