More Drupal Startups – the dream of Dries Buytaert


Photography by Tim Miller

In his Keynote address at the DrupalCon, Sydney, Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal talked at some length about his vision for the future.

He encouraged the community to think about more startups using Drupal. As examples, he mentioned Drupal commerce and Ubercart – two popular startups providing e-commerce solutions using Drupal.

Two other examples in the CRM space are

Redhen and civiCRM. While Red Hen is a CRM developed for non profits which is Drupal Native, CiviCRM has been developed for civic sector and non profits.

Buytaert sees huge opportunities in the following areas for startups:

  • Marketing Automation
  • Personlisation
  • Analytics
  • DAM (Digital Asset Management)

Another key point that was on Buytaert’s wish list was larger agencies, with typical Drupal team size of about 3,000 developers.

Up to this point, most of the Drupal development work has been undertaken at the instance of customers. A client requests a specific feature and then the developers create that feature for the client and also contribute it to the community for the benefit of others.

For Drupal to be able to offer WEM, it will help to get bigger clients that require a large number of features. Typically bigger clients would ask for complex features and this would lead to the creation of these features for Drupal. This, in turn, will help build Drupal WEM.

Most of the Drupal shops today have less than 50 employees and a turnover of less than US$10 million.

Buytaert also encouraged the community to build experience in verticals such as media and government.

He hopes to be able to provide Drupal WEM by 2020.
OK, so the above in effect summarises Buytaert’s vision for Drupal WEM, but where do you and me figure in this?

Some of the areas where Drupal community will be able to contribute to realising this vision are in the following areas.

  • Work on what matters, what is relevant.
  • Drupal companies can attempt larger projects
  • For those who are users leverage web to drive the business
  • All work in Drupal do well financially and do good to the community
  • How can we help in the process?

    • Make Drupal 8 the best release till date
    • Explore options for more start ups
    • Try to build bigger Drupal companies
    • Try to make better integrations and share solutions with the community

We wish Buytaert all the very best in realising those dreams and will be with him and the Drupal community every step of the way!

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