I had the chance to meet with Drupal CMS creator Dries Buytaert at the SXSW conference last week. After the chat with Buytaert, I started to wonder if a CMS war is on the horizon.

The distributed, open-source SaaS model will expand the range of available software.

Right now if you think about the way software-as-a-service is delivered, Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Google are the most commonly cited examples. All these companies deliver their software using what is known as the multitenant model. Just as multitenant software knocked on-premise vendors for a loop, new distributed, open-source models for delivery of SaaS software will have a powerful impact.

Acquia announced recently they were releasing a new tool called Drupal Gardens that makes it easier to create websites using the popular open source Drupal platform. In a recent blog post Acquia VP of Marketing, Lynne Capozzi wrote about how, rightly or wrongly, some people are intimidated by the idea of building a website using a tool like Drupal.

It's great for the power users who can build an understanding of how site building in Drupal works, but Drupal Gardens puts this in the hands of less technical end users. It provides an easy path to creating the site, then choosing a theme (either provided or one you create on your own), color schemes, fonts and so forth.

Social networking true believers use words like engagement, responsibility, and transparency that smack of the Internet's hippie days in the late 1990s, yet social networking has proved to be much more than a passing fancy. The exploding numbers associated with the most popular sites like Facebook and Twitter inspire awe in even the most jaded statisticians. Time spent on social networks increased 277% in the United States last year, according to media research firm Nielsen, and Twitter itself grew more than 500%.
Now the social media category is primed to emerge as the most significant business enabler since the Internet itself. Organizations must ask themselves seven important questions about their plans for leveraging social networking over the next 12 months. Their answers may spell the difference between success and failure in the coming decade.

Among the many open source projects on the upswing is Drupal, a content management system written in PHP; Drupal has attracted a lot of attention from developers and mindshare among end users. This week, when Drupal 7 was about to go into Alpha test, I spoke with Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal and also the founder of the Drupal services company, Acquia. We discussed several topics, from community building to Drupal's role in e-government to lessons that other open source communities can learn from Drupal's success.

Just 31 years old, Dries Buytaert already has an impressive hit list. He’s the creator of Drupal, an open source content management system, and CTO and founder of Acquia, which works with enterprise customers on Drupal projects. With 2 million downloads since inception in 2001, more than 750 developers have contributed code to Drupal 6, the latest version. There are more than 400,000 Drupal-based sites.

Acquia, which Buytaert founded in 2007 to bring Drupal into the enterprise, is backed by North Bridges Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures. Enterprise-level companies using Drupal include Turner Broadcasting, Zappos and Sony.

Currently Buytaert and team are working on Drupal 7.

I recently spoke with Drupal founder and Acquia CTO and cofounder Dries Buytaert. Dries gave me an update on Acquia's success to date and plans for the future. Many readers know Acquia as one of the key vendors behind the White House's recent move to open source.

Acquia has achieved significant traction in its two years of existence. Dries points out that the company spent a year establishing a sustainable business model and strategy, as well as working within the Drupal community. According to Dries, Acquia only began revenue-generating efforts a year ago.

WhiteHouse.gov was relaunched in November with an open source Drupal platform. Although Drupal is used by other government agencies in the United States and around the world, WhiteHouse.gov is the most visible customer turning to this platform.

Dries Buytaert is the creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform. A native of Belgium, he was elected in 2008 as Young Entrepreneurs of Tech by BusinessWeek as well as MIT TR 35 Young Innovator.

Buytaert recently talked with FierceGovernmentIT's Judi Hasson about the deployment of Drupal, and what it's impact will be.

Read more: http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/dries-buytaert-founder-drupal-wh...

Computerworld speaks with Drupal's lead developer and several Drupal shops about the open source CMS used in a growing number of organisations around the world, including the Prime Minister’s office.

The open source content management system (CMS), Drupal, continues to gain popularity both locally and internationally. The CMS powers several new high profile websites including the Prime Minister's site, launched last month and designed by Canberra-based company OPC IT and ABC's three digital radio websites – Dig Music, ABC Jazz and ABC Country. Internationally, it is used by organisations as diverse as Obama's administration in the US to Greenpeace to McDonalds.

Two years ago, Drupal's lead developer, Dries Buytaert, told Computerworld that his five-year goal was to see many more people using Drupal in many more places to build increasingly complex websites. With a number of attention-gaining Drupal sites launched around the world since then, it seems that Buytaert is on his way to achieving that goal.

Buytaert is predicting that, as has been the case in other countries, the recent launch of large government websites like the Prime Minister's and the ABC sites will trigger further Drupal adoption in Australia.

Drupal is a fantastic Web publishing platform that derives much of its value from a disparate community of contributors, as Xconomy recently wrote. With more than 4,000 contributed modules from over 3,000 active contributors (741 of which contribute to Drupal Core), Drupal has something for everyone, which is both its greatest asset and biggest liability.

Choice is good. Too much choice, however, can be bad.

The same holds true for Red Hat, which charges a premium for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution to enterprises that want to tap into Linux but don't want the bother of rolling their own version of Linux from Kernel.org.

The problem, however, is that such a business model depends upon the complexity of the underlying platform. If that complexity goes away, does the business model?

The Drupal-focused company Acquia is thriving because deploying Drupal, what with its myriad of choices, can be complex. Ditto for Red Hat. There are thousands of packages that comprise Linux, making it worthwhile to pay a trusted guide like Red Hat.