"Frietjes van de frituur"
Taken 30 minutes ago with my new Panasonic GF1 and the Lumix 20mm f1.7 pancake lens. Handheld, no flash, but edited in Adobe Lightroom. Those fries are no more.
VT4 using Drupal
Flemish commercial television channel VT4 is using Drupal on http://www.vt4.be. VT4 is part of ProSiebenSat.1 Media, the second-largest broadcasting group in Europe. Cool!
Final 2009 wrapup
Over the last couple of days, I've written about how Drupal, Acquia and Mollom performed in 2009, respectively:
I don't write these posts to pass time. I write them for you and me. I write them for you, because you might benefit from my experiences. I write them for myself so I won't forget the details when I tell my grandchildren about you, and the crazy ride that was Drupal. That is why for me, technologies like Twitter and Facebook, won't replace blogging -- they complement blogging. I predict that I'll continue to blog in 2010, whether you like it or not.
All in all, I've never worked harder than in 2009. 14 hour work days were standard, and I traveled almost 100,000 miles (160,000 km).
It paid off because 2009 was a year of growth. Drupal grew, Acquia grew, Mollom grew. The Drupal Association matured, and with the birth of Stan, my family grew. I met a lot new people, and learned many new things about both technology and business. There was a lot of personal growth in 2009. I pushed my boundaries and those of many of my peers.
Unfortunately, 2009 saw some regressions also. I virtually stopped doing any sports and I've been taking fewer pictures. To some extent, I inadequately addressed the growth of our family -- Stan is still sleeping in our bedroom because we don't have a spare room in our apartment, and our 8 year old car broke down on several occasions and is way too small for us as a family. Both need upgrading. And, with a growing network of people, it is hard to stay in touch with all your friends. Long story short, you can probably guess several of my 2010 resolutions.
But, on days like today, when looking back at the past year, I am reminded of how lucky I am. 2009 was been a great year, and I'd like to thank all of you who have been part of it. You're my dream team.
Mollom 2009 retrospective
For Mollom, milestones came fast in 2009. First, we celebrated that Mollom had blocked 25 million spam messages. Two months later we celebrated that Mollom had blocked 50 million spam messages. Fast forward another 3 months, and Mollom blocked 100 million spam messages. We ended the year with 163 million spam messages blocked (700% annual growth, up from 21 million in 2008) and 15,000 sites actively using Mollom (330% annual growth, up from 4,500 sites in 2008).
Not included in any of those statistics is the fact that Mollom partnered with Netlog in 2009, one of the fastest-growing web communities in Europe. Mollom is now protecting the messages of more than 40 million Netlog members, in more than 25 different languages. Each day, Netlog members exchange more than 4 million messages, all analyzed by Mollom for spam and unwanted content in real-time.
Last year, we spent a lot of time dealing with the pains of, frankly, our unexpected growth. We're handling well over 200 million HTTP requests each month, making Mollom the largest web service I've ever helped build -- a very fun and rewarding experience from the technology side. We launched additional servers and rewrote our backend infrastructure to improve scalability and ease of management. True success is measured by the fact that we had to purchase solid state disk drives (SSD) because we needed at least 100 times faster read and write times than regular hard disks could deliver. ;)
But best of all, on the business side, we were able to increase our investments while steering the company to profitability. That is a big win, because it proves that the business model works.
I predict that in 2010 we'll continue to do much of the same but that you'll also see some more "visible" changes -- maybe a new website, and almost certainly some new APIs and functionality to better combat spam. Blocking spam is a really hard problem, and spammers continue to adapt and refine their techniques. We have more work to do, but are committed to winning the spam game. But spam is only part of the problem in website moderation, this is why I expect that in 2010 Mollom will start providing solutions for different aspects such as language detection, content quality, profanity and malicious content.
Will we grow as fast in 2010? Only time will tell. We're a very small company, but Mollom has barely scratched the surface of its potential, so I have every reason to believe that 2010 will be another great year for Mollom.
Acquia 2009 retrospective
Yesterday I shared my 2009 retrospective on Drupal along with some predictions for 2010. Today, I want to reflect on Acquia's 2009, as for obvious reasons, Acquia has been a big part of my life in 2009.
At the end of 2007, we had convinced ourselves -- and our investors -- that there was a market for Drupal support and Drupal-related products. In 2008, we built a great team and grew from two employees early in the year to thirty people by the end of 2008. After nine months, in October 2008, we finally opened our doors for business and we wrapped up the year with a couple dozen customers. 2009 was really Acquia's first year in business (i.e. revenue-bearing year), making it a very important year for us as a company. Other than delivering great support, we had to demonstrate that there was a market for Drupal support, and prove our business model by discovering many of the unknowns and validating our assumptions (e.g., average sales cycle, conversion rates, operational costs, etc). 2009 was also the year that we had to build a sales and marketing process that is both scalable and efficient.
We kicked of 2009 with a big but important change. When we opened for business at the end of 2008, customers could purchase commercial support for all the modules in Acquia Drupal, our free distribution of Drupal. We learned relatively fast that people wanted support for more than just Acquia Drupal. So, only a couple of months later, in the first week of January 2009, we announced our support for all things Drupal 6, including all modules and themes available on drupal.org as well as custom code.
Next, at a two-day management meeting early in the year, we established some very ambitious goals and shared the details publicly in our 2009 roadmap. With all these new projects, we needed additional management bandwidth in the company so Jay and I hired Tom Erickson as Acquia's new CEO. This has been one of our best decisions to date, as Tom has proven to be phenomenal at his job.
To deliver on the vision outlined in our roadmap, we had to raise more money -- no small thing given the downturn in the economy. Instead of reserving cash, Tom and I went out and raised an additional $8 million dollars in Series B funding, bringing our total funding to date to $15 million USD.
A Series B financing typically happens when the company has proven its core value proposition, has demonstrated its ability to find customers, and has proven its business model. In the first six months of 2009, we grew our customer base to 250 paying customers -- demonstrating the market for Drupal support, validating our business model, and allowing us to raise that Series B funding.
We used part of the new funding to accelerate our support business and grew it to more than 400 customers by the end of 2009. We handled thousands of support requests last year. The size and type of business also grew throughout 2009 -- 2009 was definitely a turning point for enterprise Drupal adoption.
The rest of the new funding was used to build the new products outlined in our 2009 roadmap, including Acquia Hosting, Acquia Search, various Acquia Stack Installers and Drupal Gardens (currently in private alpha). We helped get the Acquia Stack Installers included in Ubuntu, Solaris, and on Microsoft's Web Gallery. Our Windows version was one of the top downloads on the Microsoft Web Gallery.
We also helped Whitehouse.gov to move to Drupal -- an important turning point for Drupal within the government sector.
As a company, we contributed back to the Drupal community by funding much of the usability work carried out by Mark Boulton, by helping with developing the Field API for core, by providing manpower and funding for some of the drupal.org redesign work, by helping with the drupal.org test infrastructure, by contributing to Drupal's Apache Solr integration, by sponsoring local and global Drupal events, by giving away free hosting, and much much more. In short, we tried to help where (I believe) Drupal needed help the most.
For a small company of our size, we had a lot of balls in the air, but we learned to juggle well. Most companies don't share their roadmaps but we did, we stuck with it, and we delivered. I'm proud of Acquia for what we did in 2009 -- it has been a great year.
As for 2010? The launch of Drupal Gardens will be a big blip on our 2010 radar. Later in January, we have another two-day management meeting to finalize our roadmap for 2010. Keep an eye on acquia.com or on my blog if you want to learn more about our plans. A lot of what we'll do will resolve around extending and improving our existing products in support of our customers, but we'll probably launch a few surprises as well. Stay tuned!
Update: Tom posted his perspective on 2009 on the Acquia blog. Good that we're on the same page. :-)
Drupal 2009 retrospective and 2010 predictions
It's that time again. Time to look back at 2009, and to look forward to 2010.
In my 2009 predictions for Drupal, I was pretty much spot on -- except for the Drupal 7 release date. I predicted that the two most exciting features in Drupal 7 core would be custom content types and radical improvements in usability, that a number of important contributed modules would move into core, and that core would embrace the semantic web. I hoped that our community remained strong, and it did. Our community is our biggest asset and Drupal 7 wll be our best release yet, and I'm very proud of both. We accomplished much by working together in 2009, and I'm very confident of what we can -- and will -- do in 2010.
On a personal level, 2009 was a very busy Drupal year. I posted 3,269 comments on drupal.org (up from 1758 comments in 2008), and committed 1,567 patches (up from 1,031 patches in 2008). I accepted many more speaking engagements that evangelize our work, wrote more blog posts (215 blog post in 2009, up from 183 in 2008), and more.
My two personal Drupal highlights for 2009 include Whitehouse.gov switching to Drupal and the automated testing that we deployed on drupal.org. In fact, having now experienced its benefits, I'm not sure how we ever developed without automated testing in the past. The current Drupal 7 development snapshot feels more stable than the initial Drupal 6.0 release (minus obvious exceptions like no working upgrade path). Automated testing improved our development velocity as we committed many more core patches than any previous year. Other highlights include the many Drupal books that were published, and of course, the first Drupal tattoo -- both strong proof that Drupal is here to stay (or, at least, that tattoo is ;-)).
My personal low for Drupal in 2009 is that we didn't get the Drupal.org redesign implemented -- fortunately, we have that back on the fast lane.
2009 was also the year that Drupal started to get noticed by CIOs as illustrated by the fact that Gartner put Drupal in the visionaries quadrant and the number of Fortune 500 companies that started using Drupal. While Drupal grew in all dimensions, it probably saw the most relative growth within the enterprise. I think this is part of a bigger trend, because it feels like Open Source became almost generally accepted in 2009. Many more businesses realized that Open Source is a viable alternative, and as a result, I don't recall many Open Source "battles" in 2009 like those of the past. It is a little sad because I enjoyed fighting the good fight, and because it provided a healthy competitive edge. Reality is that, for the most part, we have won the Open Source battle. Open Source matters more every day and is changing the software industry -- already Microsoft is working on an Open Source blogging platform. These industry changes will also likely reflect, and even change, the Drupal ecosystem. In the years to come, expect competing software vendors to adopt our Open Source techniques and licenses, and expect large consulting organizations to have their own Drupal teams.
While we didn't see a major Drupal release in 2009, it was a great year nonetheless. We've used 2009 to position ourselves for continued success in 2010 and beyond. In 2010, I predict a number of stars will align: (i) the release of Drupal 7, (ii) the launch of the new Drupal.org redesign, (iii) at least a dozen of specialized Drupal distributions gaining momentum, (iv) test-driven development for contributed modules and (v) Acquia's Drupal Gardens and Buzzr (but only if they have a free tier) that will positively impact Drupal adoption. All of these initiatives are in different stages of development, but I believe there's a big chance that their combination will translate into breakout growth by the end of 2010. It also implies that 2010 will see some big changes, which is never easy.
Going forward, it is important we keep up with the larger market, which is evolving faster and faster with dozens of cool new services and APIs being launched almost every day. As a large Open Source community, we are better positioned to keep up than any proprietary vendor. We have many more people contributing to Drupal than proprietary vendors would ever be able to hire. However, proprietary vendors excel at focus and execution. There is nothing we can't do, but it is important that we're focused on the right things, and that we continue to be execution-driven. Let's remember our oldest mantra: "Talk is silver, code is gold".
As people start to build more products on top of Drupal, it is important that Drupal doesn't get in the way, and that it provides the flexibility and ease of customization that Drupal site builders demand. The winning platform will be the easiest platform to build on, not necessarily the platform that has the most flexibility. Over-generalization hurts both discoverability and adoption. Drupal's power vs. flexibility vs. ease of use is a tough balance to manage, but in general, our success in this balance has created Drupal's success. Our ability to maintain that balance is key, however, I hope and predict that for Drupal 8, we'll be very focused on improving the developer experience and lowering the barriers to participation (while maintaining Drupal's power and flexibility).
In general, I think content management systems have matured to a point where, for most people, they have relatively few differentiators at their core. That is why user experience is becoming perhaps the most important differentiator for non-niche users. The Drupal 7 usability project was a bold move but I hope we learned that bold moves aren't all that disruptive as they sometimes appear at the beginning. As Benjamin Disraeli, former British Prime Minister, put it: "Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.". I hope that, like 2009, we all continue to focus on user experience in 2010 because the single biggest barrier to the success of Drupal will continue to be ease of use as an end-user tool.
Mentally, it feels like we've surpassed Joomla! already, but it will take a number of years for that to trickle down and sink in, and even longer for the numbers to start reflecting that. I don't think we'll surpass Wordpress any time soon, but I do think Wordpress will continue to approach us from the bottom up. But, as Open Source goes mainstream, it won't matter all that much. In 2010, we'll start to compete against proprietary vendors, some of which will start to adopt Open Source strategies themselves. If they succeed, it could change the game because they'll bring focus and execution on top of the Open Source value proposition. Whatever happens, we'll benefit from the extra competition in 2010.
Thanks for 2009! It's been an honor to be a part of the Drupal project, and it remains so today. We have plenty of work to do in 2010 so let's all focus on making change happen.
