Steve,
Thanks for the valuable write-up. Following up on Matt's point, why
couldn't the 'Plone Foundation' be the organization/vendor rated by the
analysts? Let them analyze the staying power of the Foundation, the
project, the CMS - that has to be a strength of Plone that we're not
capitalizing on enough.
The downside of not using a Plone vendor/integrator might be that the
analyst might have a difficult time estimating the annual revenues,
number of employees, headquarters and other demographics/metrics they
normally include in their reviews.
I suspect that to gain coverage by the analysts, though, there will be
some 'analysis fee' or some such fee paid to Gartner, Forrester,
whomever we want to have cover Plone. If it's not too huge an amount
(and we could take collections for those interested in coverage), and if
there is enough interest in having Plone compared in the same reports
(it should be, IMHO), then we will have lifted the bar for Plone.
If others agree, we can write a message to the Board to investigate and
go through the proper channels/process.
-Ken
Matt Hamilton wrote:
On 23 Nov 2009, at 08:07, Dylan Jay wrote:
All great points, and agree with you... one point specifically I have
been noticing recently...
8) The party line on Acquia is that what's good for Acquia and Dries
is good for Drupal. I saw not a hint of discomfort with that.
I think this is one of the most important points. Maybe it won't
last, and maybe the community will suffer long term by Acquia making
lots of money? Maybe Drupal will end up being vendor opensource with
all its downsides? Who knows.
In the medium term, as an Plone development company, I think Acquia
gives Drupal an unfair advantage. Just the other day we had a very
large organisation say they went with a proprietary solution because
"we can't sue Plone" and decided this before we could even present to
them or explain that opensource means you can purchase a plone
solution from an integrator and then sue them if it goes wrong. We
have liability insurance :)
Acquia gives Drupal the perception of size and credibility to those
who don't know any better. We can dismiss these risk adverse decision
makers of big organisations but I think those people matter. I agree
with Dries when he says "We should all agree that at the end of the
day, success should be measured by the number of people working with
Drupal, not by the number of people working on Drupal". Plone kicks
Drupal and a lot of proprietary CMS butt, feature for feature but
Acquia makes Drupal easier to sell by giving the perception of
security. Anything we can do to help sell plone is good for plone
otherwise we risk being "irrelevant".
... Acquia have shown up on a few 'Magic Quadrant' type lists from
Analysts. Not Drupal, but Acquia. Now Plone is not listed there at all
as it is just an Open Source 'project' and not a 'vendor' in the
traditional analyst sense. That said I think that is an advantage ;)
but I'm sure potential buyeers might not.
Someone recently pointed out that the role of most Gartner-type
analysts is not to comment on the suitablity of the CMS to your
particular organisation, but to just comment on whether the vendor is
going to be around next year or not. Hence why 'Plone' is not on those
lists as it is not a 'vendor', but it does make me think we do lose
out a bit on mindshare as a result.
Its a tough one as I agree what you say about Acquia making Drupal
easier to sell.... but on the other hand I don't want to ever end up
with a 'Plone Acquia'.
-Matt
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