Enterprise social communities and Drupal
Jay just posted a blog post, called Building enterprise social communities with Drupal, sharing a white paper that we have written at Acquia. In this white paper, we answer questions like: what kind of social features Drupal supplies, why Drupal is the best choice for building a social site, what Drupal modules are useful when building a social site, and some examples of successful enterprise Drupal communities.
The reason we wrote this white paper is simple: many of the enterprise organizations that we talk to ask us these questions over and over again. Building social business sites is a very hot topic in the enterprise. The work environment in these organizations is evolving, and increasingly more, people want to connect, create, share and find people and information relevant to their work. Needless to say, not all social business sites are equal -- some are team collaboration sites, some are community sites, and others might be networking sites. They can exist behind the firewall for internal teams, or they can be external facing sites to engage with partners and customers.
We wrote this white paper because we wanted to demonstrate that Drupal provides a great platform to build these kind of social sites for the enterprise. If you are interested in building a social site for your enterprise and don't know where to start, have a look at our white paper. Also, if you've built, or have a Drupal site around which you have built a successful community, we'd love to learn about it, and learn from it.
Druplipet, a Drupal chia pet
And the answer to yesterday's "Eye grow Drupal" question is: Druplipets. Hundreds of cute little Druplipets, your friendly Druplicon chia pet. Druplipet is the newest member of the Acquia and Drupal Gardens family and will be making appearances at industry events this year. It is making its first appearance at SXSW along with a fun contest. Needless to say, Drupal chia pets are fun and powerful stuff!
City of Athens using Drupal
The City of Athens has launched a new Drupal site to serve as its official website, along with a Drupal-based site at http://www.breathtakingathens.com/ that provides visitor and tourism information.
Athens is a large city (3.5 million residents and 6 million tourists each year), with a large tourism base due in part to its role in the 2004 Olympic Games. To support the city's needs, the site includes a large calendar of city events, a comprehensive map-based index of city services and interactive tools that allow citizens to access city resources. The site builds on Drupal's multilingual capabilities to provide information in both Greek and English.
The history of MySQL AB
MySQL, the open source database product that puts the "M" in LAMP, was created by MySQL AB, a company founded in 1995 in Sweden. In 2008, MySQL AB announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Sun Microsystems for approximately $1 billion.
The story of MySQL AB is pretty amazing, so I unleashed my "inner academic", did some research and compiled a timeline of MySQL AB's history. This timeline is assembled based on different resources online, such as MySQL press releases (example 1) and interviews with MySQL AB executives (example 2, example 3), etc.
Things to add? Let me know in the comments and I'll update the post.
1995
- MySQL AB founded by Michael Widenius (Monty), David Axmark and Allan Larsson in Sweden.
2000
- MySQL goes Open Source and releases software under the terms of the GPL. Revenues dropped 80% as a result, and it took a year to make up for it.
2001
- Mårten Mickos elected CEO at age 38. Mårten was the CEO of a number of Nordic companies before joining MySQL, and comes with a sales and marketing background.
- 2 million active installations.
- Raised series A with undisclosed amount from Scandinavian venture capitalists. Estimated to be around $1 to $2 million.
2002
- MySQL launched US headquarters in addition to Swedish headquarters.
- 3 million active users.
- Ended the year with $6.5 million in revenue with 1,000 paying customers.
2003
- Raised a $19.5 million series B from Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures.
- 4 million active installations and over 30,000 downloads per day.
- Ended the year with $12 million in revenue.
2004
- With the main revenue coming from the OEM dual-licensing model, MySQL decides to move more into the enterprise market and to focus more on recurring revenue from end users rather than one-time licensing fees from their OEM partners.
- Ended the year with $20 million in revenue.
2005
- MySQL launched the MySQL Network modeled after the RedHat Network. The MySQL Network is a subscription service targeted at end users that provides updates, alerts, notifications, and product-level support designed to make it easier for companies to manage hundreds of MySQL servers.
- MySQL 5 ships and includes many new features to go after enterprise users (e.g. stored procedures, triggers, views, cursors, distributed transactions, federated storage engines, etc.)
- Oracle buys Innobase, the 4-person Finnish company behind MySQL's InnoDB storage backend.
- Ended the year with $34 million in revenue based on 3400 customers.
2006
- Mårten Mickos confirms that Oracle tried to buy MySQL. Oracle' CEO Larry Ellison commented: "We've spoken to them, in fact we've spoken to almost everyone. Are we interested? It's a tiny company. I think the revenues from MySQL are between $30 million and $40 million. Oracle's revenue next year is $15 billion."
- Oracle buys Sleepycat, the company that provides MySQL with the Berkeley DB transactional storage engine.
- Mårten Mickos announces that they are making MySQL ready for an IPO in 2008 on an projected $100 million in revenues.
- 8 million active installations.
- MySQL has 320 employees in 25 countries, 70 percent of whom work from home.
- Raised a $18 million Series C based on a rumored valuation north of $300 million.
- MySQL is estimated to have a 33% market share measured in install base and 0.2% market share measured in revenue (the database market was a $15 billion market in 2006).
- Ended the year with $50 million in revenue.
2007
- Ended the year with $75 million in revenue.
2008
- Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB for approximately $1 billion.
- Michael Widenius (Monty) and David Axmark, two of MySQL AB's co-founders, begin to criticize Sun publicly and leave Sun shortly after.
2009
- Mårten Mickos leaves Sun and becomes entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital. Sun has now lost the business and spiritual leaders that turned MySQL into a success.
- Sun Microsystems and Oracle announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion.
Mollom CAPTCHAs are "intelligent"
Every other week or so, someone asks me the following question: How are Mollom CAPTCHAs better than those created by CAPTCHA module?. This is an important question, and understanding it is central to understanding our philosophy with Mollom.
First, when using Mollom in "text analysis" mode, a CAPTCHA is only displayed when Mollom is uncertain about whether a message could be spam. Mollom analyzes the text of comments and combines that analysis with what it knows about the internal reputation of the posters, to determine whether a message is "spammy". Non-spam submissions are accepted without a CAPTCHA, and posts that are certainly spam are rejected automatically. By only presenting a CAPTCHA when necessary, we avoid penalizing normal (non-spamming) users with CAPTCHA challenges. The CAPTCHA module is different in that it does not perform text analysis and therefore must always display a CAPTCHA challenge.
Second, the Mollom module for Drupal has a "CAPTCHA only" mode, which is useful when clients would prefer not to use text analysis, or for when the forms have almost no text to analyze (like Drupal's user registration form). In "CAPTCHA only" mode, the user experience of the Mollom module is very similar to that of the CAPTCHA module -- the user is always prompted to complete a CAPTCHA in order to perform a certain operation. The similarity ends here, however. While the user experience is the same, the actual CAPTCHA generation is not. Mollom CAPTCHAs are "intelligent", in the sense that Mollom tracks the behavior and reputation of IP addresses from all sites using Mollom. A known spammer, operating from a known IP with a poor reputation, won't be able to complete a Mollom CAPTCHA no matter how hard he tries. And, as more users install Mollom, its performance increases as it learns from the additional data. A stand-alone module like CAPTCHA doesn't learn from user behavior, as it simply generates CAPTCHAs without regard to their context and delivery.
This second difference between the Mollom and other CAPTCHA modules is, in fact, huge. When we analyze our server logs, we see that 20% of all correctly completed CAPTCHAs are submitted by known spammers. Spammers don't seem to solve CAPTCHAs algorithmically; instead, they persuade humans to solve CAPTCHAs for them by using botnet infected machines. Two blog posts that detail this process are How to defeat Koobface and Breaking Koobface's CAPTCHA solving process. As spammers evolve and their arsenal of tools become increasingly powerful, CAPTCHA solutions must keep up to remain effective. We believe Mollom's "intelligent CAPTCHA" processing represents a significant benefit from traditional CAPTCHA generation and is one way we'll continue to stay a step ahead in our goal to eliminate posting spam.
Different protection modes in the Drupal module for Mollom.
Open Source in the Enterprise and in the Cloud
In a couple of weeks, I'll participate in a panel discussion on The Future of Open Source in Business. In preparation for that discussion, I figured I'd write down my current thoughts and solicit some feedback. I'll talk about two important trends relevant for the future of Open Source, but there are certainly more.
First, Open Source adoption in the enterprise is trending at an incredible rate -- Drupal adoption has grown a lot in 2009 but we saw by far the biggest relative growth in the enterprise. Fueling this movement is the notion that Open Source options present an innovative, economically friendly and more secure alternative to their costly proprietary counterparts. Second, Cloud Computing is a transformational movement in that it enables continual innovation and updating - not to mention a highly expandable infrastructure that will reduce the burden on your IT team.
Two years ago, when starting Acquia, we predicted this would happen so it is no surprise that Acquia's strategy is closely aligned with those two trends: Drupal Gardens, Acquia Hosting and Acquia Search are all built on Open Source tools and delivered as Software as a Service in the cloud. Combining Open Source tools and Cloud Computing makes for the perfect storm for success. It provides real value to end-users and it enables companies to monetize Open Source. It creates a win-win situation.
At the same time, I think we have an opportunity to go beyond that, and to redefine the Software as a Service model based on Open Source values, almost exactly like we started doing 10+ years ago with off-the-shelf software. Almost all Software as a Service providers employ a proprietary model -- they might allow you to export your data, but they usually don't allow you to export their underlying code. While a lot of these services might be built on Open Source components, they have a lot more in common with proprietary software vendors than Open Source projects or companies.
There is room for Open Source companies to disrupt this model, and it is probably not something that can be done without the help of Open Source companies. Drupal Gardens provides a good example of this model.
For example, users of Drupal Gardens can help improve Drupal Gardens, simply by contributing to Drupal. By staying close to the Open Source project, everyone can help shape the service. Along the same lines, we want people to be able to export their Drupal Gardens site -- the code, the theme and data -- and move of the platform to any Drupal hosting environment. By doing so, we provide people an easy on-ramp but we allow them to grow beyond the capabilities of Drupal Gardens without locking them in.
It is Software as a Service done right -- it will offer enterprises a much more secure and low-cost alternative to proprietary counterparts and provides many Open Source projects the opportunity to have a much bigger reach. It creates a triple win scenario -- for the customer, for the Open Source project and the Open Source company -- in a way that wasn't really apparent five years ago. At least not to me.
Have you taken the 2010 Future of Open Source Survey yet? If not, please take a few moments to share your thoughts on where you think Open Source is headed.
