Business and marketing track descriptions

Major goals of this track

Promote a sustainable business ecosystem in the Drupal community
Educate businesses about the benefits and costs of using Drupal as a platform for their business
Market successful use of Drupal through case studies and showcases

The track co-chairs identified that there were internal and external business needs for the community. Internally, individual members of the community and some businesses have needs to improve their business development capacity. External to the community we noted that businesses are having trouble understanding, and quantify the benefits of open source. Despite being free software, Drupal has a cost component and businesses external to the community are struggling to model the costs to their business.

The conference organizers conducted some research and asked Drupal business users what they thought it would take for Drupal to “break through”. The conclusion was largely marketing for Drupal needed to improve by providing case studies, and more show cases demonstrating industry solutions.

We looked at upcoming business challenges for the Drupal community. Jim cited Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the chasm, and noted that Drupal had significant challenges to move from it’s current state of early adopters to wider acceptance with more robustness in both the software and businesses. We need the community to present a unified front about the challenges we face ahead.

Recommended track session topics:

The business and marketing track co-chairs are requesting that members of the Drupal community propose presenting the following sessions. Presenters who offer to present these sessions are likely to have their session selected for the conference. Presenters who agree to collaborate with other members of the community to present these topics collaboratively or as part of a panel are even more likely to be selected to present.

The Drupal ecosystem

Building sustainable Drupal business that support the community
Small giants: building high quality Drupal businesses
All About Open Source: Not Free as in Beer (What Does That Mean?)
My Drupal: A Panel Discusses Drupal in the Open Marketplace
The Costs of Free Software: A Panel Discussion
Drupal marketshare:What can developers do to increase the reach?

Businesses learning to use Drupal

My Drupal: A Panel Discusses Drupal in the Open Marketplace
Small Pond, Giant Fish: How to effectively recruit in the Drupal community
Business Best Practices: Drupal Companies Share Tips and Tricks
Running Virtual Teams: A Panel Discussion
Monetizing an open source deployment: How is value created? Where is the value? When? Why an open source deployment is a ‘real option’ for the firm.
Enterprise deployments: How they differ from small sites? Issues? Working with the client team? Structure/Documentation requirements
Fast, Cheap, Great: You Pick Two (Differentiating)

Case studies

In depth examinations of the use of Drupal for particular organizations
Case Study: How Sony’s Multi-Site Installation Uses Drupal
Case Study: How Mansueto got X people to use Drupal

Showcase

Co-chairs

The co-chairs are:

Liza Kindred is Lullabot’s Business Director. She brings to the table a myriad of experience including owning her own clothing boutique and managing multi-million dollar inventories. Liza’s passion is the business of Open-Source. Liza is the person who first suggested that the Drupal conference should have a business and marketing track to the conference organizers. Many of the ideas for the Boston conference come from Liza and her colleagues at Lullabot, including the job fair, and choosing quality over quantity.
Jim Edgett is the director of corporate development at Achieve Internet. His experience is bolstered by an MBA from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University and his Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. He has a long standing interest in Applied Mathematics and modeling. He joins Achieve Internet to actively increase organizational value by leveraging open source trends, developing Enterprise & Web 2.0 products and launching new services. Jim and his colleagues are responsible for creating industry networking events to help meet the needs of clients, and business managers who were attending Drupal conferences
Jeff Whatcott is the Vice President of Marketing from Acquia. Jeff spent almost eight years leading software businesses at Adobe, Macromedia, and Allaire. During that time, he learned how to grow and work productively with the strong communities around Adobe’s Flex, Flash, and ColdFusion product lines. At Adobe he was part of the team that released Flex under an open source license and made the Tamarin ECMAScript virtual machine a joint open source project with Mozilla.