Deliver digital faster with Drupal Part 2

In Deliver digital faster w ith Drupal Part 1, I show ed you some of the many examples of successful sites built rapidly
thanks to Drupals modularity. To stay ahead of your competition, you need to be nimble and agile; Drupal helps you do
this w ith reusable, transferable digital experiences that can be customised to suit various niches even w ithin a single
business enterprise. All, of course, w ithout paying additional license fees or mandated limits on developers,
environments, or copies.

Faster, less risky

... and cheaper! Keep w hat w orks and integrate it w ith Drupal; replace w hat needs replacing. Incremental, targeted
projects are not only far less risky than Big Bang all-or-nothing releases, they are faster to get out the door, too!
Drupal lets you release a new feature or try out a new MVP, but in days or w eeks rather than months.
I spoke w ith Blint Klri, Head of Technology at Indivizo.com, in Acquia Podcast #146 about how Drupal is enabling
Indivizo to make a Softw are-as-a-Service-based product business. He cited time-to-market as the number one
reason:
"I believe the biggest thing here is that I was able to create the prototypes in a very short time.
We could validate our business idea, our whole startup idea, and iterate on top of that. Doing
that is really efficient in Drupal because you can build things very quickly. You have great
tools."
Site and project builds are faster, less risky, and more focused w hen using Drupal. Drupal professionals address
common business concerns every day in the course of w orking on the digital front lines and they share their solutions
and best-practices w ith the larger Drupal community. Drupal gives your developers a great solution-base to start w ith
and lets them focus on solving the interesting, innovative, and unique parts of your project, w hile relying on Drupal to
deliver all the functionality you should expect of an up-to-date content management system.
When starting w ith Drupal, you are removing a lot of risk from your project. You are taking advantage of a proven,
enterprise-ready technology. Because less custom coding is required, and because Drupal is very popular w ith
governments and security-conscious corporations around the w orld, you are getting the help of thousands of
hackers and security experts around the w orld every day in addition to the built-in expertise of tens of thousands of
Drupal developers.
The continuous and broad peer-review enabled by publicly available source code supports
software reliability and security efforts through the identification and elimination of defects that
might otherwise go unrecognized by a more limited core development team. - US Department
of Defence CIO memorandum Clarifying Guidance Regarding Open Source Software
Because Drupal is modular, extensible, and standards-based, it helps you maximise your existing and future
technology investments. When you choose Drupal because you w ant to take advantage of the latest the w eb has to
offer analytics and personalisation, for example unlike many proprietary systems, you dont need to rip out all your
existing, w orking systems and install a unified ultimate solution to everything; that w ill be out of date next year
anyw ay. Drupal offers integrations w ith most every existing technology, service, and data source on the w eb today
and unlike unified, monolithic, solutions it is also future friendly. Being open, extensible, and standards-based
means it is ready for the new services coming further dow n the line.

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Community as accelerator
Drupals large, active developer community gives you fast, specifically tailored, custom development, too. While
preparing a large customer project, a major systems integrator identified an essential module that needed further
development before being included in the projects code base. An estimate w as made regarding the amount of
in-house development required to make the fix. At the same time, maintainer of the module in question w as
approached about making the necessary improvements. Since she knew her code base inside and out, she w as able
to make the requested changes in a fraction of the time and much more cost efficiently than an in-house developer.
The systems integrator kept their resources focused, w hile the targeted investment in the module maintainer paid off
in parallel, efficient cooperation w ith the rest of the team; they w ere able to increase their production speed and
efficiency beyond their in-house capacity.
This project w as completed faster and cheaper than w ould have been otherw ise possible, because of Drupals
collaborative, massive open-source developer community. A recent quote by Ben Golub, the CEO of Docker,
regarding doing business in an open source context rings true to me in this context:
I would much rather be an ubiquitous platform and face competition on how to manage that
platform than to be a stand-alone tool, both proprietary and unknown.
Its this very focus on platform improvement and collaboration in Drupal, rather than platform competition, that leads to
such efficient code fixes. Keep in mind as w ell that Docker is a grow ing cloud technology backed by an active
developer community of less than 1,000 developers plus a company providing commercial support and other service
offerings around it. Sounds a lot like Drupal and Acquia, except that Drupal is supported and multiplied by an active
developer community of more than 20,000, an active professional and user community of more than 80,000, and a
plethora of other professional service providers. This is w here the pow er of open source at scale really starts to
shine.

Do what you do well, but faster

In these tw o posts (Deliver digital faster - part 1 and this one, part 2), Ive pointed out that w hatever your business,
Drupal offers you scalable, reusable, remixable solutions, backed by a large community of professionals. Since your
content management needs are met right out of the box, you and your teams can focus on w hat is important: your
core business. Your new and innovative ideas can be the focus of your time and investment.
Other companies in your niche are probably already using Drupal, meaning that you can benefit from mutual
coopetition shared concerns can lead to shared solutions. Sony Music and Warner Music both use Drupal, for
example; but they are competing in marketing music and entertainment, not w asting effort trying to compete in core IT.
Once youve built a solution the first time, the next one is going to be even cheaper and faster to build, since you can
reuse all the Drupal components as many times as you like. If a module needs creation or adjustment, Drupals large,
professional community can efficiently accelerate your development cycles. Drupals modularity and extensibility also
allow s you to make targeted changes and improvements, keeping w hat w orks and adding new functionality as you
need it.

Also in this series

1. Why Drupal? Because It Will Help You Win
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2. Why Drupal? First Principles

3. Deliver digital faster w ith Drupal Part 1
4. Deliver digital faster w ith drupal Part 2

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