Summary: In April 2015, I was excited to talk with John Doyle, General Manager Technology & Solutions Architecture at the Australian full-service digital agency Komosion, to explore their decision to adopt Drupal to replace other technologies, including an in-house CMS they'd invested 10 years of work in. In this podcast, John very clearly lays out what Komosion's priorities were in making this decision, the benefits for the agency and its clients, and the future he sees using Drupal as the basis for future work. The full-service agency I wanted to get a feel for what a "full-service agency" is, what sort of technologies and solutions they offer, so that I would better understand what Drupal can do for Komosion and similar businesses. John explained, "We offer the full digital solution from strategy, customer experience, design, right on through implementation ... apps, websites, etc." Meeting customers' needs PD (pre-Drupal) "Komosion came about from the merger of two organisations," a Melbourne-based, product-focused company, "called Komodo CMS. They had a proprietary CMS which went through a couple of different iterations and came into being ten years ago. It's now up to version 7 and it's still our proprietary system. Over the years, it's won awards for innovation. It was one of the first SaaS based CMS offering in Australia. We offer a managed technology solution for our clients; we manage our whole infrastructure. Along the way, we've looks at a number of different technologies and trends, but we've kept everything in-house to date. It's on our proprietary system which comes with its own foibles." "It's getting to the point now where we're saying, 'What else is there in the marketplace that is mature enough, enterprise ready, and able to deliver for our clients ... and for us ... what we need for our strategy, not just in technology. We deal a lot at the C-level, the executive level, with organisations, driving digital strategy, helping then shape their digital teams through content, through design, through our digital and technology solutions. We partner with them for the long haul ... and we need something to partner with for the long haul, too." Becoming a Drupal-based agency John sees parallels between Komosion's practice and Drupal's evolution from wanting to be the standalone solution to everything to integrating with and leveraging the best specialist frameworks and tools out there. Komosion went from building all of their own systems and infrastructure, "but it has got to the point now that for us to take the next step and extend out platform the way that we want to–we see our platform being much more than just the CMS, it needs to be a full marketing tool suite–we need to partner with best-of-breed. Bring them all together, package [and extend] them as a solution for our clients that is going to give them everything that they need day to day from a marketer's point of view." "We just can't compete with the passion and the level of input and contribution that a project such as Drupal has behind it. We understand that. We agree with the direction it's taking. We think that the minds that are behind it are brilliant and we're jumping on board. That's how we've come to where we are." "The best solution for our clients is the goal. For us, as a client, our best solution at the moment is Drupal. We're actually taking our proprietary platform and we're going to be converting that to run off Drupal." John is expecting to have features beyond the current set and have clients on the Drupal version of their platform within 12 months–"highly, highly rapid development." They're going further than using Drupal just as a CMS and are looking at everything that Drupal the framework is capable of, from decoupled Drupal applications, to integrations with marketing automation, EMD & CRM tools, and more. The solution will still be Sass-based and fully managed, but...
