Is Drupal Finally Enterprise-Ready?

The open source CMS platform Drupal is going commercial thanks to an 11-person startup named Acquia. It recently secured $7 million in funding and plans to sell a suite of services it says will make Drupal enterprise-ready.The history of Drupal is an undertold open source story, according to Jeff Whatcott, VP of marketing at Acquia.

Whatcott told InformationWeek the last Drupal release was a compilation of code from more than 900 contributors. To put that in perspective, the last release of Apache Web Server, one of the Web's largest open source projects, included a community of coders numbering about 50. He also claimed Drupal's Web traffic is comparable with MySql, which is impressive considering many believe MySQL to be the Web's database. Sun Microsystems believed it enough to pay almost $1 billion for MySQL.

Acquia says Drupal represents much of the convergence taking place in today's content-rich Web environments. In fact, it would like you to believe Web content management, social media software, and Web application frameworks are combining into a new category called "Social Publishing."

If you combine the Web and enterprise content markets along with the dollars flowing into social software, you have to think Acquia has a shot at generating some real revenue.

Although the community behind the open source Drupal platform is large, it lacks some of the formal structure enterprise customers typically require. As Whatcott said, "We're taking the raw edge off of Drupal and bringing it across the finish line."

The big challenge there will most likely be helping the armies of Drupal consultants help each other, something Whatcott likens to being part teacher and part channel manager.

It's a tall undertaking, but if the social publishing opportunities I'm seeing in the marketplace are indicative of a larger shift, watch out for that funny little Drupal icon. It might be appearing in your browser sooner than you think.