DrupalCon Asia brought a lot of big names to India, and one among them was Holly Ross, Executive Director at the Drupal Association. Holly was excited about India, and traveled the length and breadth of the country before the commencement of DrupalCon. We got an opportunity to chat with her about Drupal enterprise support, and Indian Drupal companies and developers.
Ans. Drupal is not just about building websites for companies. It is an engine which drives many different experiences for companies and their customers. The interesting thing for businesses is to think about how they can leverage Drupal to connect to other services—marketing tools like Magento, data tools and databases. Drupal provides that flexibility, and it is important to see how these different things interact with each other, and help deliver experiences for enterprise customers.
These experiences range from someone coming to a website for the first time, to their experience on a mobile device, and with shopping. This experience can be for any kind of content delivery you can think of. The whole world is content-driven now. Using Drupal to fuel that engine is the trend we are seeing, and it is something companies should be paying attention to.
#DrupalCon India @drupalhross @DrupalAssoc @DrupalConAsia https://t.co/sKo30ORD2v pic.twitter.com/d0vaRP1xJf
— Josef Dabernig (@dasjo) February 20, 2016
Ans. We have already seen that Indian Drupal companies are playing a major role with bigger integration services companies. But there is a larger opportunity for Indian companies to showcase themselves. Indian companies should more actively participate in the community through core code contributions, supporting modules to Drupal 8, and writing case studies. All these things can then be highlighted on their company profile on drupal.org. This acts a resume for the company and shows the world what they can do, and the value they will bring to the table. So the first step is to get involved in contributions and then market this on the organization profile on drupal.org.
Ans. We have been able to bring people together from different parts of India, who don’t otherwise get the opportunity to meet. My impression of India has always been that it is so big, that it has so many countries in one. So we are excited that people from India and other Asian regions have met each other. It will help them to make connections, become better developers, and grow their Drupal businesses.