Drupal has a two-prong enterprise strategy

Drupal and the Acquia support group launched by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert have a two-prong strategy for the enterprise, I was told in an interview yesterday.

DrupalGardens for the Internet, the coming Drupal7 with Acquia support for the Intranet.

The news peg here is an agreement with Cap Gemini to promote Drupal as part of its Immediate platform. On his blog Buytaert compared it to the decision by Dell and IBM to ship Linux on their machines in 2007.

In an interview with ZDNet Buytaert added the deal will help Acquia grow its European footprint, alongside a European partner with 95,000 employees. Currently Acquia has 65 employees, and while it provides support during "European hours" as well as American ones it wants to expand its technical staff there.

Drupal's footprint belies its size, said Acquia CEO Tom Erickson. The company recently spidered the top million sites, based on Alexa's estimates, and found over 1% of them running Drupal. There are over 16,000 sites now running DrupalGardens, the company's hosted offering.

"While Facebook and other social platforms are banned in the enterprise, enterprises are still trying to use this technology inside," often through Drupal, he said. DrupalGardens makes it easy for a marketer to build brands online, while enterprises adapt to the Intranet version.

For its enterprise customers Drupal goes first class. Drupal Gardens is hosted on Amazon's cloud. Aquia supports enterprises with a 24x7 help desk and service level agreements. "We have a sophisticated support management system that does tickets in a traditional way," Erickson said.

The bottom line is that Drupal is becoming enterprise software, and Acquia a respectable enterprise software company, he concluded.

Yes, you can do that with open source.