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The business of Drupal

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Last night I made a presentation on the “Business of Drupal” to the Sydney Drupal users meetup. The talk covered the subject areas of scalable jobs and wild randomness, basic business models in the software industry, the GPL, eight business models for Drupal in increasing order of scalability, ways developers can deepen their skills and a round up of how various organisations in the Drupal community are structuring the way they do businesss. I have just uploaded the slides to the talk.

For those wanting a little bit more detail without going to the slides, I’ll reproduce some of the content here.

Drupal business models in increasing order of scalability

1. Employment

  • Employment at Drupal shop or company
  • Income limited by salary (skill, experience)
  • Non scalable
  • Very regular

2. Pure services

  • Contractors, Drupal shops, F2F training
  • eg. Cross Functional, Previous Next
  • Income limited by incoming jobs (supply) and staff
  • Non scalable due to staffing requirements
  • Variable regularity, no subscriptions

3. GPL products with services

  • Distribution owners, module authors
  • eg. Phase2, Ubercart
  • Income limited by product popularity and staff
  • Non scalable due to staffing requirements
  • Variable regularity

4. Drupal hosting platform

  • Drupal hosting
  • eg. Acquia Dev Cloud, Managed Cloud, Chapter Three Pantheon, Omega8cc Aegir
  • Overhead of maintaining platform – Aegir
  • Scalable
  • Regular

5. Drupal as a service (DaaS)

  • Drupal running as a SaaS
  • eg. Drupal Gardens, Buzzr, wordpress.com
  • Overhead of maintaining platform
  • Scalable
  • Regular

6. Software as a service (Saas)

  • Service accessed via bridge module.
  • eg. Mollom, Acquia Solr
  • Overhead of maintaining platform
  • Scalable
  • Regular

7. Products with some non GPL code

  • Themes
  • eg. Top Notch Themes
  • Overhead of deloping product
  • Scalable
  • Irregular
  • Problem: Is the main IP in the code or the images?

8. Products with all non GPL code

  • Online training, documentation, books
  • eg. Lullabot drupalize.me
  • Overhead of deloping product
  • Scalable (online training)
  • (Ir)regular

Possible areas of specialisation for service providers

  • Data migration: Data is like wine, code like fish
  • Theming: Where are the themers?
  • Custom module development
  • Project scoping
  • Verticals: distros
  • Server admin, deployment (?)
  • Performance (?)

The main takeaway idea from the talk was that working in non-scalable areas such as full time employment is a safe option which will yield good results so long as you have skill and apply yourself. However, exposing yourself a little to some “wild randomness” in the form of scalable ventures (startups, SaaS, distros) could be a worthwhile pursuit if you are successful.

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