Dropsolid had many breakthroughs in the Drupal & Mautic universe in the last two years and this post can be seen as an update on our vision of 2022: "The most open DXP with a low entry barrier". In this post we'll discuss the opportunities for the company, the community and the partner ecosystem.
You might have seen that we have changed our tagline from "Dropsolid experience cloud" to "Dropsolid experience platform". This makes the update in vision very clear. It is 3 fold:
We want to make clear that next to delivering Drupal as a DXP we also have brought our hosting & devops platform to the next level. We introduced containerised hosting, many new features that help you build DXPs with Drupal & Mautic and we introduced enterprise capabilities at SME prices.
The world has changed and many organisations want to stay sovereign to stay free and don't want to be locked in. Our open DXP allows you to own the code, the data, the AI and the infrastructure. You can now run the open DXP on prem or in a hybrid way. To reflect that we dropped cloud from our tag line and changed it to platform. You can now host the most open DXP in a sovereign way.
We believe the SME market wants an all in one open DXP out of the box. We believe the Drupal core engine is the best candidate. We also believe sailing Drupal into new blue ocean markets will be key to maintain the health of the business and partner ecosystem.
Sharing our strategy openly
I thought it was in everybody's best interest that we'd share our company strategy openly because we believe it is key to understand where we want to go.
The win for the community
As you might have noticed Dropsolid is doing everything it can to invest in the Drupal ecosystem with: Platinum Partnership, the EU Drupalcon Diamond sponsorship, sponsoring many camps and the US Drupalcon, the D7 EOL, the investment in the security team, the investment in Starshot with a track lead, ...
We also upgraded our capabilities regarding ISO27001, modernised our hosting/devops platform towards container based architecture, released many new features for making developing Drupal based DXPs easier and also won some impressive customers over with the open DXP story. For example the: German government Bundesagentur für Arbeit, EASA, UZA and many more.
In the Mautic universe we did at the same time the same effort: sponsoring at the highest level, providing the free trial infrastructure worldwide, sponsoring on the product level the upgrade to 5.x through the product lead Mattias, sponsoring Anderson a core contributor with a massive upgrade in UX with Mautic 5.1 and being top contributor in the ecosystem.
To understand where the effort of Dropsolid could lead to, I'd like to share our vision & strategy. In the elections I already put forward the general idea. To make it a bit more tangible I wrote a blogpost on dreaming about the long term potential of Drupal. I believe the path for Drupal towards bluer oceans is there.
In short, all these contributions will lead to:
Increasing Drupals appeal in the SME market (= companies from 100 people to a couple of 1000, spending 100-500k on an open drupal based DXP implementation and 10ks-100ks on licences for DXP)
Attract new talent to the Drupal community: It would also keep our web/drupal talent engaged by allowing them to work with data and AI to enhance the user experience. They would become DXP developers. Our customers' web-masters would become DXP-masters.
Allowing the business ecosystem to position Drupal in new ways: And our web-agency would become a DXP-agency, differentiating us from regular agencies in a currently red ocean market.
I also realize the main focus in the community is to get Drupal Starshot out and reclaim lost territory in Drupal as a CMS market. The next focus should be to sail Drupal into the open DXP market through enhancing the core and packaging Drupal as an open DXP.
For me, the journey beyond going to the Moon and to going to Mars, is to get Drupal out there as an open DXP. I also think it will be a requirement to stay relevant in the crowded CMS market.
How is Dropsolid already trying?
- By applying for grants to contribute the missing key capabilities to the Drupal core.
- We applied for the grant through the Eureka program with Open Social and are hopeful we'll get it.
- We have won a 300k research grant to add AI sovereign to Drupal and DXP
- Other grant sources
- By investing the profits of Dropsolid into Drupal & Mautic contributions (see above).
- By investing the revenue from our partnerships using the Dropsolid experience platform to build DXPs
What would be the win for the partner
- Get leads through Dropsolid to do open DXP business in the market. This vision attracts customers and wins business from normal web-agencies. Currently we are scaling up our sales efforts and are reaching out to all SMEs using Drupal.
- Be in the market as 1 of the first with a fully Drupal based open DXP.
- Build together on the Drupal community edition and rise in the Drupal ecosystem. If Drupal DXP is a strategic initiative then we would earn lots of credits. In any case we would make our companies stronger on the services front. And Drupal would also become stronger which would be a community win anyway for everyone.
- Use the Dropsolid brand and experience platform to gain a competitive advantage in the market like we did in the Belgian market and win more deals.
The DXP story gets you access to more deals. Every company is investing in the data layer to get first party data and make it actionable to deliver better experience and generate more business and be more operationally efficiënt. And they all want AI, which we can give it to them in a useful way because we would have the data from user, event and content. All in Drupal.
What is special about the Dropsolid experience platform?
- You can build in all freedom with the most open experience platform
- Hosting & devops platform with open DXP in mind
- For ambitious Web/DXP-masters and Web/DXP Agencies
- Enterprise capabilities at SME prices
- Modern containerised hosting & devops experience for SMEs and Enterprises
- ISO27001 certified
- Sovereign personalised experiences. Many govs and orgs are moving away from proprietary SaaS and cloud lock-ins and want true freedom.
- Unlock personalisation with AI in a sovereign way
- Drive more traffic, create engagement conversion on your Digital experiences
- Truly open DXP, no cloud lock-in
- In the cloud, on prem and hybrid options for your open Sovereign DXP
Conclusion
I know we are still a long way from achieving a fully based Drupal DXP but we are already selling Drupal as a component of the open DXP together with other open source applications like Mautic for marketing automation and Unomi for personalisation and are achieving a truly open DXP for our customers right now.
We know open DXP with Drupal as CMS sells. Open "fully Drupal DXP" will be even more successful. To get started: Dropsolid platform is best optimised for the hosting and building an open DXP.
Bringing open DXP purely with Drupal would be the dream. We want to help true Drupal companies to be part of the journey towards bringing Drupal to more blue oceans. By doing so we would also be helping the other 5000 companies in the ecosystem as well.
Win win for business and community.