Integrating Drupal into the Enterprise Architecture

Kieran Lal from Acquia led a session on making the enterprise argument for Drupal. These are my notes and videos from the session. Please forgive brevity on the posts and feel free to follow my notes with the videos below. I think, in conjunction, they should make sense.

He started by talking about the Whitehouse.gov success story when it transitioned to Drupal after President Obama's campaign site had been built in it.

-- There was a strategy session at the White house with Kieren and Dries
-- Recovery.gov started in Drupal but eventually lost to Sharepoint - all government contracts come up for open bid on each contract cycle
-- Currently 58 federal sites are in Drupal and there are about 500 in the pipeline right now

I recorded updates on Gardens and Acquia largely facilitated by Dries.

Since December my focus has been helping shepherd the transition of Examiner.com from ColdFusion to Drupal 7. We are in the thick of the project which is utilizing the efforts of multiple companies and many contractors.

The size of the site is amazing. It may well end up being the largest Drupal site as of the time it launches. The site is moving from SQL server to MongoDB to scale to the heavy traffic the site enjoys.

In October of 2007 I wrote a short tutorial on how to set up a local install of Drupal on a Mac.  Since originally writing the post I have received feedback ranging from “Thanks for documenting the process-it is really easy!”  to “You’ve got to be nuts!  I don’t understand 3/4s of what you are saying!”

At Drupalcon DC, Acquia announced a “Drupal Stack Installer” that simplifies the process significantly. 

The Acquia Update session looked at the history of Acquia since last year, where the company is now, and where it is headed.  There was presentation on the company’s current offerings and how they might change in the future.  This blog post is a stream of listening while the presentation was going on.  I may or may not choose to tidy it up in the future.

• Q3 07 Jay and Dries Founded Acquia
• Q4 07 Closed Series A funding 7 million
• Q1 08 Launched Acquia at Drupalcon Boston
• Q3 08 Beta release of Acquia Drupal and Network
• Q4 08 Opened doors for business
• Q1 09 30 employees

Two days ago it was announced that pingVision has become an Acquia Platinum Partner.

I've heard Acquia described thusly as Redhat is to Linux, Acquia is to Drupal. Acquia offers commercially supported Drupal, "providing products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system."¹

Jay Batson and Dries presented an introduction to Acquia. This is a report on what was said and is based on my notes at the time.

Dries had the idea to start a company and at Drupalcon in Sunnyvale, Jay "dropped out of the sky". Drupal was finding its way to a tipping point. Its usability has improved, but still could be further improved upon and to be really successful the overall ecosystem must be increased.

Acquia will seek to be a provider of services like Ubuntu, Zend, RedHat, and MySQL all of which have commercial ventures/companies behind them.