Co-inciding with Dries Buytaert's first visit to India during the week of 07 - 11 Nov 2011, Srijan took the lead in organising the Drupal Camp Delhi 2011 at JNU. The event saw 250+ registrations, with over half of these being professionals working in the Drupal development space or business users of Drupal. We know that the entire Drupal professionals community in this region was not present at the event. As an example, some important Drupal and open source enthusiats could not make it, and cities like Chandigarh and Jaipur were quite under-represented, as the event was on a Monday (we can't help it; Dries chose that work-week to be in India! :) ). That perhaps gives a sense of the size of the Drupal commnity in the north India region.

CXO Event

A major highlight of the event was the CXO event, conceptualised and moderated by Srijan's CTO, Ankur Gupta, on the sidelines of the Camp. It was a first time ever, round table of CXOs of Drupal companies in India.

The participants were Srijan Technologies, Azri Solutions, Liquid Designs, Monsoon Consulting, Tekriti Software, Drupal Forest, and even Acquia joined in with Dries Buytaert, Ron Pruett, and Jacob Singh participating.

The event started of with all participants sharing their backgrounds, and also the best and worst decisions they had taken in their businesses. They went on to discuss the challenges they face in the Indian environment, rates, developer crunch, lack of good developers, and so on. However, in my opinion the following were the key points and take aways from the event.

If the Drupal community grows our businesses grow

"Passionate developers can take Drupal to places where companies cannot take it". Dries offered this insight, during a ranting session on poor customer education about Drupal among Indian businesses. It was observed that most of us Drupal shops were running into Joomla and Wordpress as comparisons and getting beaten down on prices for Drupal development.

Everyone seemed to agree that building up a Drupal developer ecosystem was critical to the adoption of Drupal and the resulting ease of our businesses to penetrate the Indian CMS market. I observed and Dries endorsed, that while Acquia could help in different ways, this was a problem that the business community in India had to solve by themselves - collaboratively. Dries further shared that their philosophy is that 'if the Drupal community grows, Acquia grows'. I am certain the same principle applies to each one of our comapnies in India as well.

Find your niche

To succeed in the Drupal ecosystem, charge better rates, and make your mark, a key advise was to find a specialisation. All the M&A that has happened in the Drupal space has been owning to specialisations that people and companies developed.

Dries also shared that the most respected and recognised Drupal companies in US are doing just Drupal; and that this may be an option for companies to consider. [On that note i should share that Srijan is one of the few Drupal-only shops in India; we used to work on TYPO3, Django and Ruby on Rails; but gave up all these to focus on Drupal alone in July 2010.]

Product Engineering, it was discussed, is another business model that Indian companies could adopt and grow up the value chain internationally.

Giving visibility to important Indian Drupal implementations

Dries offered that if there important and big Indian implementations that we should write to Dries, and he may be able to write about them on his pesonal blog. This would certainly give these websites, and the companies who built them, a lot of visibility internationally.

Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress

Dries mentioned that Acquia has never run into comparisons with Joomla or Wordpress while pitching Drupal in the enterprise. I observed that the story in in India, and even while pitching for clients in US was different for us. Everyone agreed that Joomla and Wordpress hardly had the architecture to compete with Drupal in the enterprise, but it was also observed that this argument rarely sells with customers; and that we required a more detailed tech analysis document. Dries offered that if there was such a high-priority list coming out from the CXOs, then Acquia could help come up with research documents for those.

Further Steps

A fallout of this CXO event is that the Drupal companies have started to talk about collaboration. A lot of companies had agreed to collaborate with each other by referring support clients to the companies offering Drupal Support (there were two of them - Srijan - Dharamshala unit, and Drupal Forest). This would be huge step forward in enhancing the Drupal business ecosystem in the country.

Representatives of Srijan and Liquid Designs have already met once to discuss a Drupal Training strategy, and plan to involve more companies from India in the initiative.

We're due to send across to Dries a list of high-priority points, such as support in a research paper on Joomla and Wordpress versus Drupal's architecture - specifically for positioning Drupal in the enterprise in India.

Overall a wonderful event. We'll have more such events in the coming months.

If you're interested, here's a really nice post which captures more discussions and ideas from the same event. I'll leave you with some pictures from the event to end this post. A video of the complete event is expected to be put up shortly. You would find more pictures at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Drupal-Camp-Delhi/109565432460133