Last night I made a presentation on the “Business of Drupal” to the Sydney Drupal users meetup. The talk covered the subject areas of scalable jobs and wild randomness, basic business models in the software industry, the GPL, eight business models for Drupal in increasing order of scalability, ways developers can deepen their skills and a round up of how various organisations in the Drupal community are structuring the way they do businesss. I have just uploaded the slides to the talk.
For those wanting a little bit more detail without going to the slides, I’ll reproduce some of the content here.
Drupal business models in increasing order of scalability
1. Employment
- Employment at Drupal shop or company
- Income limited by salary (skill, experience)
- Non scalable
- Very regular
2. Pure services
- Contractors, Drupal shops, F2F training
- eg. Cross Functional, Previous Next
- Income limited by incoming jobs (supply) and staff
- Non scalable due to staffing requirements
- Variable regularity, no subscriptions
3. GPL products with services
- Distribution owners, module authors
- eg. Phase2, Ubercart
- Income limited by product popularity and staff
- Non scalable due to staffing requirements
- Variable regularity
4. Drupal hosting platform
- Drupal hosting
- eg. Acquia Dev Cloud, Managed Cloud, Chapter Three Pantheon, Omega8cc Aegir
- Overhead of maintaining platform – Aegir
- Scalable
- Regular
5. Drupal as a service (DaaS)
- Drupal running as a SaaS
- eg. Drupal Gardens, Buzzr, wordpress.com
- Overhead of maintaining platform
- Scalable
- Regular
6. Software as a service (Saas)
- Service accessed via bridge module.
- eg. Mollom, Acquia Solr
- Overhead of maintaining platform
- Scalable
- Regular
7. Products with some non GPL code
- Themes
- eg. Top Notch Themes
- Overhead of deloping product
- Scalable
- Irregular
- Problem: Is the main IP in the code or the images?
8. Products with all non GPL code
- Online training, documentation, books
- eg. Lullabot drupalize.me
- Overhead of deloping product
- Scalable (online training)
- (Ir)regular
Possible areas of specialisation for service providers
- Data migration: Data is like wine, code like fish
- Theming: Where are the themers?
- Custom module development
- Project scoping
- Verticals: distros
- Server admin, deployment (?)
- Performance (?)
The main takeaway idea from the talk was that working in non-scalable areas such as full time employment is a safe option which will yield good results so long as you have skill and apply yourself. However, exposing yourself a little to some “wild randomness” in the form of scalable ventures (startups, SaaS, distros) could be a worthwhile pursuit if you are successful.
4 Comments
I would concur with the concluding summary. As a contractor, I have steady well paid work on long term contracts but am also engaging in some side projects with some long term potential, its definitely the way to have the best of both worlds.
Nice! I love seeing this type of analysis. I’d argue that the PaaS (Platform as a Service), DaaS, and SaaS are all roughly equally scalable, and that all three are more scalable than the themes or training offerings. The reason for that is that you only consume training offerings once, and you have to continually new IP for themes. The *aaS offerings can all be written once and served to infinity.
Hi Robert. Ah ha – PaaS. Another acronym for my arsenal
Yes, I think you could shuffle the last few items around a little. This is due to the amazing powers of the *aaS model: the scalability of products with the regularity of services. I was perhaps putting too much importance on the last two items being products and not enough on the scalability of *aaS.
That said, I really do like the TNT and drupalize.me approaches because the products they are selling are reasonably simple. Once the product has been made it just needs to be hosted and served. ie. much simpler than maintaining a service with all the diligence that that requires. It’s probably easier for individuals to “hit the big time”, so to speak, with these kinds of models, ie. more akin to an author having a best selling book.
In the case of drupalize.me the offering is a subscription method and so there is the chance for it to be ongoing. I suspect that a lot of people would dive in though, binge and then stop the subscription. So yeah, maybe irregular. Some premium theme sites also attempt the subscription method as well.
We are going to see a lot more *aaS in the future
During the presentation of the slides a question was raised as to the true GPL status of images and CSS files. ie whether the TNT approach was valid. The proposition was that the non-GPL status had never been tested in a court and that it was unclear. This may be the case, however, it’s worth pointing to the response Matt Mullenweg got from the Software Freedom Law Center.
This is the approach which the Drupal community has taken as well.