Why CTOs of big companies choose Drupal

Deciding on a CMS these days is not a simple task. There are many things to take into account and lot at stake.

• Business websites are more important then they ever were and if a business wants to communicate effectively, it needs a great website.
• Budgets and lead times for new CMS deployments get bigger and projects more and more complex. Often, it is difficult to plan for a complete overhaul and businesses have to plan for a phased approach. 
• The business moves faster and the CMS has to keep up the pace with changes in requirements and technology

All the above means that often a CMS re-deployment is a multistep project for many months or even years. One cannot allow for errors. Choosing incorrectly can set the business back years.

In this ever-changing, fast-paced environment Drupal stands out as one of the best choices available. Here is why:

Speed of delivery and flexibility

One of the great risks of licenced products is being left behind the market. If your vendor does not build the features you need, you might get left behind the competition.

By choosing Drupal, CTOs have great flexibility and are not bogged down by one vendor’s feature list. With Drupal and its hundreds of modules, they can build whatever they like. They are also free to extend Drupal, building unique advantages for their companies.

Another thing to consider is the vendor's capacity to deliver. With a licenced product, a company is often locked down with one vendor and if his capacity is reached, development slows down. With Drupal, even if one vendor is at capacity, a CTO can easily extend by adding another one. This is quite often a strategy large enterprise clients chose from the outset - work with multiple agencies in parallel.

Standards and best practices

Being an Open Source project, and a very successful one, Drupal has clearly defined best practices and standards. This helps CTOs in many ways:

• It is easier to set expectations from vendors
• It is easier to replace one vendor with another
• It is possible to cooperate with multiple vendors, setting the requirements on the commonly accepted development standards at the same time

Budget considerations 

Being open-source, Drupal does not have a licence fee. Licences, when it comes to the Corporate Market, can be quite expensive. This is an immediate financial benefit to the CTOs organisation

Long term, typically services of companies operating in the Open Source are a bit lower than those of their counterparts offering licenced products. This is because the cost of licenced tooling, partnership fees etc ado not have to be recharged to the end customer.

Another way in which Open Source can help reduce costs is by access to a wider range of service providers. Of course, you should still choose companies that are reliable and trustworthy, but in the Open Source, there are many smaller agencies and outsourcing partners, who, in the right mix, can help reduce the overall development bill.

Drupal prides itself in having a very vibrant business community. A CTO can choose from a really wide range of Drupal service providers, starting from the really big, like Accenture, through medium Drupal focused agencies like Droptica, down to a few-person-shops or even freelancers.

It is also quite common to handle initial ideation and development close (e.g. same city) and then hand-off the big delivery tasks which require a lot of manpower to an outsourcing partner in a region with lower costs - like Central or Eastern Europe. With Drupal being popular all over the world, you can easily find talent everywhere.

Drupal is tried and tested

CTOs time perspective is usually at least 5 years into the future. Often more. Choosing a technological solution with such a timeframe in mind is not easy. There aren’t too many solutions which withstood the test of time. Most of the other Open Source frameworks and proprietary CMSs are on the market since just a few years. Others have their best times behind them.

Drupal withstood the test of time. It is on the market for over a decade and is still extremely strong. The vibrant community is growing the number of websites built on Drupal is growing steadily. Choosing Drupal, the CTOs know they will have a growing framework to work on which will continue to have wide support and a plethora of vendors years to come.

Drupal is fully Enterprise ready

With the release of Drupal, any gap between proprietary CMSes and their Open Source counterparts has disappeared. Drupal offers everything Corporate clients need. 

API First

CTOs know that integrations are more and more important. To answer that, Drupal has built an incredible API framework. Out of the box, most of Drupal is available via JSON API. This includes all the content and a lot of the configuration. 

Drupal API is also not just an afterthought. It is baked straight into Drupal core functionality. Thanks to this, all the Drupal features, like content access permissions, translations, entity states and more are automatically available via an API.

Multilingual

Drupal in the 7 version was already a fantastic multilingual CMS. Drupal improved upon it even further these days. If you are building a multilingual website, there is absolutely no better alternative.

Workflow management

A typical case for an enterprise-level website is a content workflow. Drupal includes a workflow module out of the box, thanks to which, it works really great with all the other Drupal features and functionalities.

Versioning

Drupal allows for versioning content. Combined with a Workflow module this brings powerful editorial mechanisms to the table. All this is of course already included in Drupal default installation.

...and more

Drupal comes with many other prepackaged features which make it a great choice for any CTO.

Choosing Drupal is a safe bet

By choosing Drupal, CTOs chose a system which is a safe bet. Drupal will not stand in the way of the success of the project. It is a solid foundation to build on. Especially if the right vendors are chosen.