Deliver digital faster with Drupal Part 2In Deliver digital faster w ith Drupal Part 1, I show ed you some of the many examples of successful sites built rapidlythanks to Drupals modularity. To stay ahead of your competition, you need to be nimble and agile; Drupal helps you dothis w ith reusable, transferable digital experiences that can be customised to suit various niches even w ithin a singlebusiness 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, targetedprojects 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 enablingIndivizo to make a Softw are-as-a-Service-based product business. He cited time-to-market as the number onereason:

"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. Doingthat is really efficient in Drupal because you can build things very quickly. You have greattools."

Site and project builds are faster, less risky, and more focused w hen using Drupal. Drupal professionals addresscommon business concerns every day in the course of w orking on the digital front lines and they share their solutionsand best-practices w ith the larger Drupal community. Drupal gives your developers a great solution-base to start w ithand lets them focus on solving the interesting, innovative, and unique parts of your project, w hile relying on Drupal todeliver 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 ithgovernments and security-conscious corporations around the w orld, you are getting the help of thousands ofhackers and security experts around the w orld every day in addition to the built-in expertise of tens of thousands ofDrupal developers.

The continuous and broad peer-review enabled by publicly available source code supportssoftware reliability and security efforts through the identification and elimination of defects thatmight otherwise go unrecognized by a more limited core development team. - US Departmentof Defence CIO memorandum Clarifying Guidance Regarding Open Source Software

Because Drupal is modular, extensible, and standards-based, it helps you maximise your existing and futuretechnology investments. When you choose Drupal because you w ant to take advantage of the latest the w eb has tooffer analytics and personalisation, for example unlike many proprietary systems, you dont need to rip out all yourexisting, w orking systems and install a unif ied ultimate solution to everything; that w ill be out of date next yearanyw ay. Drupal offers integrations w ith most every existing technology, service, and data source on the w eb todayand unlike unif ied, monolithic, solutions it is also future friendly. Being open, extensible, and standards-basedmeans it is ready for the new services coming further dow n the line.

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Community as acceleratorDrupals large, active developer community gives you fast, specif ically tailored, custom development, too. Whilepreparing a large customer project, a major systems integrator identif ied an essential module that needed furtherdevelopment before being included in the projects code base. An estimate w as made regarding the amount ofin-house development required to make the f ix. At the same time, maintainer of the module in question w asapproached about making the necessary improvements. Since she knew her code base inside and out, she w as ableto make the requested changes in a fraction of the time and much more cost eff iciently than an in-house developer.The systems integrator kept their resources focused, w hile the targeted investment in the module maintainer paid offin parallel, eff icient cooperation w ith the rest of the team; they w ere able to increase their production speed andeff iciency beyond their in-house capacity.

This project w as completed faster and cheaper than w ould have been otherw ise possible, because of Drupalscollaborative, 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 thatplatform 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 tosuch eff icient code f ixes. Keep in mind as w ell that Docker is a grow ing cloud technology backed by an activedeveloper community of less than 1,000 developers plus a company providing commercial support and other serviceofferings around it. Sounds a lot like Drupal and Acquia, except that Drupal is supported and multiplied by an activedeveloper community of more than 20,000, an active professional and user community of more than 80,000, and aplethora of other professional service providers. This is w here the pow er of open source at scale really starts toshine.

Do what you do well, but fasterIn 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 yourcontent management needs are met right out of the box, you and your teams can focus on w hat is important: yourcore 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 mutualcoopetition shared concerns can lead to shared solutions. Sony Music and Warner Music both use Drupal, forexample; 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 f irst time, the next one is going to be even cheaper and faster to build, since you canreuse all the Drupal components as many times as you like. If a module needs creation or adjustment, Drupals large,professional community can eff iciently accelerate your development cycles. Drupals modularity and extensibility alsoallow s you to make targeted changes and improvements, keeping w hat w orks and adding new functionality as youneed it.

Also in this seriesWhy Drupal? Because It Will Help You Win1.

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Why Drupal? First Principles2. Deliver digital faster w ith Drupal Part 13. Deliver digital faster w ith drupal Part 24.

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