Drupal IS Enterprise Ready
Fri, Jun 12, 2009 by Arnold
I recently came across a 2008 blog post by George Dearing in Information Week titled, "Is Drupal Finally Enterprise Ready?" Dearing explored how the Drupal community has been growing over the past few years and how Acquia has been supporting a lot of commercial initiatives behind Drupal.
I have read a lot of posts about whether Drupal is enterprise ready in the past. I believe Drupal has been enterprise ready for at least 2 years. Over the past 2 years, we have seen multiple large-scale web sites implemented in Drupal. Some of these sites include:
Universal Music (www.universalmusic.com)
Fast Company (www.fastcompany.com)
Popular Science (www.popsci.com)
These and many others are enterprise-level web sites, and the organizations behind these sites are large-scale enterprises. The Universal Music Group and its parent company are two of the biggest companies in the world.
I think there is no better evidence that Drupal is enterprise-ready than seeing enterprise-scale web sites running on Drupal. The only thing that Drupal needs to catch up on is on the marketing end. Most large-scale Drupal sites are built for non-profits, media companies and publishers. We still have not seen that many large-scale sites for banks, airlines and other large organizations with more conservative IT policies.
On the technology level, Drupal is ready for these organizations, but on the marketing side, it is not. CIOs at major companies are often not convinced that the evolution of Drupal occurs in a controlled way. Some people are worried that Drupal will "die" suddenly and lose support. We need to inform them that Drupal's development is a steady process, and its community is not approaching anything like a decline.
Kuntoplus posted on July 17, 2009 8:59 pm
Those are some big sites using drupal for sure. It's a wonder if drupal wont make it big with that kind of references.
admin posted on June 13, 2009 4:18 pm
I wonder if the other CMS such as SiteCore do this, I am not sure if they have better tools other than version control.
Django Beatty posted on June 13, 2009 12:12 pm
These are the same issues faced by any other db-backed app such as Wordpress, vBulletin, OpenX etc. For staging, Drupal is some way ahead with various approaches - from export/import utilities seen in CCK, Views and Taxonomy to more full-blown solutions such as Services and Aegir. (There is also the very simple solution of switching between instances with multisite.) But it's clear that these apps provide proven value - I think the more interesting question for businesses is how they can take advantage of this, rather than how these apps fit in with an extant deployment method.
Litrik De Roy posted on June 13, 2009 6:14 am
IMHO Drupal will not be enterprise ready as long as there is no easy way to set up and sync different staging environments (DEV, TST, PRD,...).
admin posted on June 13, 2009 1:14 am
If you are looking at Enterprise Content Management as including Web Content Management and Internal Content Management, etc, then yes, Drupal is not ready for that. Drupal is great for the Web Content Management part. However, I can see Drupal/Alfresco integration as something that can accomplish both web and intranet content management.
Anonymous posted on June 13, 2009 1:08 am
You seem to equate "enterprise" with high profile or high traffic websites. I would suggest that "enterprise content management" means managing the content of the enterprise which encompasses both intranet and Internet content, document management etc. Given that enterprise intranets often contain vastly more content and more different kinds of sites than external-facing sites and that Drupal does not really have any serious enterprise DM capabilities, I would say that Drupal is ready for some roles within the enterprise but it's not ready to do enterprise content management.
Anonymous posted on June 12, 2009 10:43 pm
The revolution will be enterprised.
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