Re: [Evangelism] The State of Drupal
On 24 Nov 2009, at 04:36, Dylan Jay wrote: ... 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. Let me give you a concrete example why this is a worry. Recently a state government main portal here was implemented using drupal even though there was some large sites already implemented in that government with Plone. Inside information said one of the main reasons was one of the big 5 analyst companies recommended Drupal (I think it might have been PWC). Seems crazy but it makes sense when you understand how government (and any large organisation works): From the managers point of view, if the technology fails you can blame the vender but if the vender fails you can't blame anyone but yourself for not picking a better vender... unless an analyst firms makes the recommendation and then you can blame the analysts. Like all other forms of business, procurement is about shifting risk. A managers career can be over if they take the blame for bad decision but they just are just doing their job if they make the right decision. This is why they pick the safe decision not the best decision. This is the essence of why no one got fired for picking IBM. You could ask why not let the integrator take responsibility? Two reasons 1) integrators tend to be small so a manager can be blamed for picking someone obviously not up to the task. 2) If there is no obvious integrator to pick (2-3 in their local area) then the manager has to then choose and therefore made a decision which they can get blamed for if it all goes wrong. A lot of times they will also select the technology first and integrator 2nd (or better yet have the integrator recommended to them) and they don't even think about the possibility of an integrator being able to take responsibility. If they look in the yellow pages under Plone they don't get Pretaweb, they get nothing. If they look for sharepoint, they get microsoft and microsoft will happily take them out to a game of golf that the manager will conveniently win, do the sale and then recommend an integrator. Everyone happy (except the end users and the shareholders for shelling out $$$). So what managers really want is a organistion to blame that no one can blame them for choosing since its the obvious choice or recommended choice. All makes sense. I guess this is what I've been thinking about recently. The fact that the customer/integrator/vendor model that most commercial CMSs use just doesn't quite fit with the way the Plone community works. Or rather the Plone community doesn't quite fit with it, and hence the whole buying process around buying a CMS is different and often doesn't fit the existing model that customers might be used to. 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'. Well Acquia are doing a lot of things now and have seriously split their focus but when it started it had a very simple idea. They were going to be a support company and no integration. That means companies that were risk adverse can take a contact out with them and feel comfortable. They is only one Acquia so it's the obvious choice. With Plone the is no obvious choice. In fact its more than that, there almost was an obvious choice by default: Plone Solutions, but they saw this as being a potential problem for the community as a whole and to avoid confusion rebranded to Jarn. So as a community I think we are quite against the general notion of an 'obvious choice'. Or rather against the notion of *one* obvious choice for *everything*. I know that there are specific companies in the Plone community that I would say are the obvious choice (in my mind) for specific sectors or types of work. But they have got there by proving themselves in that kind of work, and not because they are the project's founder. On 24/11/2009, at 1:25 AM, Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.] wrote: 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
RE: [Evangelism] plone dot com
+1 There are more open source communities that have this setup. It would be nice to have a dot com site with a marketing story That way, those deciding won't get confused with versions of addons or documentation they don't understand. Kind regards, bc. Bas Roijen Technisch Applicatiebeheerder COFELY EXPERTS BV Information Communication Technology GDF SUEZ ENERGY SERVICES Amerikalaan 35, 6199 AE Maastricht-Airport - THE NETHERLANDS PO Box 304, 6199 ZN Maastricht-Airport - THE NETHERLANDS Tel. : +31 (0)43 367 52 09 Fax. : +31 (0)43 367 59 90 Mob. : +31 (0)6 388 260 15 bas.roi...@cofely-gdfsuez.nl www.cofely-gdfsuez.nl -Oorspronkelijk bericht- Van: evangelism-boun...@lists.plone.org [mailto:evangelism-boun...@lists.plone.org] Namens Dylan Jay Verzonden: maandag 23 november 2009 6:39 Aan: evangelism@lists.plone.org Onderwerp: [Evangelism] plone dot com hi, I know Limi mentioned something about wrestling that domain back but I just wanted note my observations on something I like about what drupal has done: giving different messages to different people. I discovered drupal.com the other day which is a slick marketing type site emphasising case studies of drupals use. That is probably targeting those deciding which CMS to use, or media. With the dot org it's more about engaging with people who will download and participate in opensource. So the dot com and the dot org kind of separate out those that understand community opensource and those that don't. That's pretty cool. For Plone, - plone dot com (how cool is plone), - plone.org (how to get involved) - plone.net (who can I sue/get a solution quickly) would be a great separation of messages (although I think plone.net could be folded back into dot org or dot com to increase it's link juice) --- Dylan Jay, Plone Solutions Manager www.pretaweb.com tel:+61299552830 mob:+61421477460 skype:dylan_jay ___ Evangelism mailing list Evangelism@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism De informatie opgenomen in dit bericht kan vertrouwelijk zijn en is uitsluitend bestemd voor de geadresseerde. Indien u dit bericht onterecht ontvangt, wordt u verzocht de inhoud niet te gebruiken en de afzender direct te informeren door het bericht te retourneren. The information contained in this message may be confidential and is intended to be exclusively for the addressee. Should you receive this message unintentionally, please do not use the contents herein and notify the sender immediately by return e-mail. ___ Evangelism mailing list Evangelism@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism
Re: [Evangelism] The State of Drupal
Matt, +1 on your final idea, but perhaps instead set this up on World Plone Day and in various countries/locations/online. Recorded sessions that could be watched later on UStream, YouTube, etc. would be invaluable, I think. Thanks for the insight on the ZEA arrangement - I was thinking something like this could be a possibility, but it sounds as if there are some details that would need to be worked out to make it run smoothly. I think that the corporate CMS vendors I've dealt with in the past have usually broken leads out into geographic regions, and just like a franchise, they attempt to not have too much overlap/competition in the same geo area. For instance, I know the 1-2 companies who would be the integrators for a RedDot/OpenText or Day Software project in the Chicago area. That's been the case for 5 years with those companies (no new VAR/partners in the region.) If we did a ZEA+ type organization, we could similarly 'franchise' it, segment market by region (and alternate or have a bidding process when there are multiple vendors in a region), and each participating organization would pay some fee to have some skin in the game and become a partner of the network. The funds of which could be used for marketing of the org, but also for Plone in general (i.e., I'm not looking for a Plone integrator until I know more about Plone.) We would need some legal help and possibly some consulting from a national sales/partnerships person from the commercial side. I know a global partnerships guy at BEA, now Oracle, if there ends up being any interest later, we might get some advice from him. -Ken Matt Hamilton wrote: On 24 Nov 2009, at 04:36, Dylan Jay wrote: ... 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. Let me give you a concrete example why this is a worry. Recently a state government main portal here was implemented using drupal even though there was some large sites already implemented in that government with Plone. Inside information said one of the main reasons was one of the big 5 analyst companies recommended Drupal (I think it might have been PWC). Seems crazy but it makes sense when you understand how government (and any large organisation works): From the managers point of view, if the technology fails you can blame the vender but if the vender fails you can't blame anyone but yourself for not picking a better vender... unless an analyst firms makes the recommendation and then you can blame the analysts. Like all other forms of business, procurement is about shifting risk. A managers career can be over if they take the blame for bad decision but they just are just doing their job if they make the right decision. This is why they pick the safe decision not the best decision. This is the essence of why no one got fired for picking IBM. You could ask why not let the integrator take responsibility? Two reasons 1) integrators tend to be small so a manager can be blamed for picking someone obviously not up to the task. 2) If there is no obvious integrator to pick (2-3 in their local area) then the manager has to then choose and therefore made a decision which they can get blamed for if it all goes wrong. A lot of times they will also select the technology first and integrator 2nd (or better yet have the integrator recommended to them) and they don't even think about the possibility of an integrator being able to take responsibility. If they look in the yellow pages under Plone they don't get Pretaweb, they get nothing. If they look for sharepoint, they get microsoft and microsoft will happily take them out to a game of golf that the manager will conveniently win, do the sale and then recommend an integrator. Everyone happy (except the end users and the shareholders for shelling out $$$). So what managers really want is a organistion to blame that no one can blame them for choosing since its the obvious choice or recommended choice. All makes sense. I guess this is what I've been thinking about recently. The fact that the customer/integrator/vendor model that most commercial CMSs use just doesn't quite fit with the way the Plone community works. Or rather the Plone community doesn't quite fit with it, and hence the whole buying process around buying a CMS is different and often
Re: [Evangelism] The State of Drupal
On 25/11/2009, at 2:28 AM, Ken Wasetis \[Contextual Corp.\] ken.wase...@contextualcorp.com wrote: Thanks for the insight on the ZEA arrangement - I was thinking something like this could be a possibility, but it sounds as if there -1 I agree with matt that this won't work and isn't good for plone. An alliance for the purposes of joint bids seems to only work on a small scale with a self chosen group that really trust each other. It was cool meeting blue alliance at the conference and seeing they do this really well. Part of what makes plone work is that any company can resell plone and if two companies compete for the same work then the better company wins. That's inclusive not exclusive and allows the Eco system to expand. ___ Evangelism mailing list Evangelism@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism
Re: [Evangelism] The State of Drupal
On 25/11/2009, at 2:26 AM, Dylan Jay wrote: On 24/11/2009, at 9:46 PM, Matt Hamilton wrote: On 24 Nov 2009, at 04:36, Dylan Jay wrote: ... 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. SNIP All makes sense. I guess this is what I've been thinking about recently. The fact that the customer/integrator/vendor model that most commercial CMSs use just doesn't quite fit with the way the Plone community works. Or rather the Plone community doesn't quite fit with it, and hence the whole buying process around buying a CMS is different and often doesn't fit the existing model that customers might be used to. All I had to do was scroll downs Dries blog and he tells us exactly how they did it. http://buytaert.net/gartner-puts-drupal-in-visionaries-quadrant First Drupal is in the quadrant not Acquia but the reason its there is a great deal to do with Acquia. What the analysts think is important: 'Here is what Nikos Drakos, Research Director at Gartner wrote about Drupal's pomotion: Drupal is in the Visionaries quadrant because of its use of the open source model to drive adoption and popularity, while providing enterprise services via organizations such as Acquia. Its strong content-centric, community and web application foundation is being rapidly extended with hundreds of modules, including many for collaboration and social interaction support.' Dries opinion on why it's important: Plus, large organizations that are about to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a website project, don't want to make the wrong technology choice. Instead, those large businesses call Gartner, or any of the other analyst firms, to get advice on what technologies to adopt. How they did it: One of the things we've been doing since the inception of Acquia, is talking to analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, and the 451group about Drupal, and all of Drupal's successes. Almost all of that work is carried out by Acquia's marketing people, but I've been in several analyst calls myself. Ie, paid marketing people who are lobbying analysts and ringing them constantly to develop relationships. ideas anyone? ___ Evangelism mailing list Evangelism@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism
