Summary: David Aponovich knows the web content management business far beyond just the "Drupalsphere". I was thrilled when he joined Acquia from Forrester Research in 2014, since I believe his voice, experience, and insight can help convince more businesses of the benefits of using Drupal, especially given the upcoming release of Drupal 8. He and I sat down at DrupalCon Amsterdam – David's first Drupal community event – and talked about digital transformation from the "information superhighway" to today, corporations and open source software as a pragmatic choice, and how the definitions of cooperation and competition are changing in business today. Taking the web seriously "Any organization that takes itself seriously today, is taking the web and digital seriously. Digital being the manifestation of web, mobile, social, even commerce activity. To take this seriously means to be invested in technology, as well as strategy and planning, and other elements. The maturity of those companies has come a long way from those old days when they were trying to figure out what this meant to them and to their customers, to today where it's very strategic to the corporate and brand mission." "This is where the winners and losers in business are happening today. The ones that get it are winning because they get it in the following ways: They get technology; that's going to underpin what they decide to from a business and a brand strategy. But they look at the digital channels through which they operate as the channel through which they talk and interact with customers, or prospects, or partners, or whomever. This takes maturity both from a technology standpoint, but from an organizational standpoint, too. Who is going to own it? Who is going to create content? Or who is going to think about the strategy that takes your business into the realm of these digital channels? How do best communicate? How do you best apply advanced techniques like personalizing the experience or giving people what they want in their moment of need whether they're on a website proper or on a mobile experience or on some other channel? These are things that take a lot of thought; take a lot of strategic planning. It takes a lot of smart people and takes technology underpinning it all, too." Discovering Drupal: passion and sharing in the community "I spent a lot of time at a digital agency in Boston and Portland where a significant amount of the work we did was in higher education. That was where I first started to encounter significant usage of Drupal as a platform for web content management. And I saw it in the spirit and the eyes of the people using it there; a kind of a devotion that you don't see often in software, where software is [usually] a tool to get something done. Drupal for these organizations was kind of a way of life almost. It was something they were devoted to both as a product, but also saying to themselves and those around them that they were part of a broader community of people advancing the technology to solve higher education needs. And then contributing back ideas or code to the Drupal community to say, 'Hey, this is how we're doing it!' Even their ideas, it was very open as a community, telling each other their strategies and their secrets to success. They were sharing that among themselves as they were sharing Drupal as a platform." Business + Drupal: pragmatism and passion "On it's simplest level, the ideal for any technology is that it serves your business needs very specifically. In this case, running a web platform, running websites, or mobile experiences, or commerce experiences. This is what companies need today from a digital standpoint. We're finding [Drupal] has crossed the chasm from [for example] higher education and non-profit into the world of true corporate brands, true enterprises that are using it, our [Acquia's] customers and others in the Drupal community. Our who's who of brands...
