With the impressive rise of Drupal over the past several years, a number of consulting and integration firms have emerged with specific expertise in Drupal. The best known of these is Acquia, the “commercial arm” of Drupal, providing products, services, and technical support. Recently Acquia began distributing a community platform called “Commons”. We caught up with co-founder Jay Batson to ask about Commons, and its role in the online community sector.

1) Could you say a few words about Acquia? What are you trying to accomplish?

Drupal usage was growing like mad in the mid-2007 time frame, especially in larger organizations. But many of the companies looking at Drupal were hesitant because they saw no single go-to vendor for Drupal support, in the same way that they may typically view the role of a proprietary software vendor, or the way they might view RedHat (or MySQL when it was independent.) This was holding back Drupal adoption, and I knew we could solve that problem by creating an enterprise subscription support business along the model of RedHat, MySQL, etc.

Plus, there were some obvious network services that we felt were important to add value to an organization’s Drupal site, such as update and uptime management, advanced website search, Drupal-tuned higher-end hosting, and others. And the list of these potential services we can provide to organizations continues to grow as Drupal continues its march into wider deployment.

So I joined with Dries Buytaert, founder and project lead of Drupal, to create Acquia to provide both subscription support & value-add network services to organizations using Drupal.

One thing we’ve been careful to do is to carefully avoid doing actual website construction as much as possible. We feel that for Drupal to continue to grow there needs to be a healthy ecosystem of Drupal development shops around the world. If we stepped too boldly into the professional services realm, we could unintentionally limit that growth, either by being a magnet for customers seeking site construction or by acting as a risk factor for entrepreneurs who wanted to work with Drupal. So though we do some work in this area, we have an established list of professional service partners to whom we feed the vast majority of this type of inquiry as referrals – without even the requirement that the partner sell an Acquia product to the end customer (though, of course, that’s our preference.)

2) You’ve recently launched a community platform called “Commons”. What is it. Why did you decide to launch this?

Two reasons.

First, we wanted to reduce the cost of building a social business software site in Drupal. We were receiving a drumbeat of inbound inquiries from customers who were looking at social software tools like Jive and others, but who needed more than simply the social software side; they needed their site to perform additional, non-social things. Some of these prospects had seen social-style sites built using Drupal, such as Symantec, Novell, and others, and wanted to know how to get one of those. Fortunately, social business sites can be built in Drupal; unfortunately, there was lots of discovery & work to do in order to find the right Drupal plug-ins, figure out an information architecture, etc. We figured if we did the bulk of the heavy-lifting once, and pulled together all the plug-ins, created the IA, page types, content types, interaction models, etc., all that would be left would be for companies to customize the graphical look & feel to their liking, and then focus their attention on the added capabilities they may want, such as integration with CRM, or web-based training, etc.

Second, there’s kind of a principle involved. When we looked at those other solutions (e.g. Jive, et. al.), we could see that the feature set was pretty well stabilized. This was confirmed by a conversation with Jeffrey Mann, a Gartner analyst, and by Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter Group. And when we looked at this feature set, there was nary a thing that Drupal couldn’t already do; it just needed pre-assembly! So it felt strongly to me like this market was ripe for commoditization by a viable open source alternative. When software gets commoditized, customer organizations win because of lower cost and the ability to consolidate and reduce the number of supported platforms in their environment. Since many organizations were _already_ going to be using Drupal, let’s give them a Drupal-based social software suite, and accelerate this market commoditization for their benefit. Of course, Acquia is already set up as a business to profit from this, so we’ll do well in the process – possibly at the expense of proprietary vendors.

3) The higher-end community platform market is dominated by proprietary platforms. Why should an organization consider open source in this space? What will they be giving up?

I’ve already given a couple of examples above, but let me state them slightly differently for this answer.

First, many of the organizations seeking to deploy a social site need more than just a social site; they need the site to integrate with some existing business system, or to create completely new, custom-to-them capabilities. Proprietary alternatives will only let you get so far with this; organizations are limited by the structure of the system and the available APIs that flow from that. Conversely, Drupal has been, and will always be a strong application platform for many purposes. There are thousands of add-on plug-ins (“modules”) that can extend Drupal, plus a vast array of mature APIs to do things where there’s no module available. (This is why it was so easy to make Drupal into a social software solution.)

No other platform provides the freedom to adapt your social site to your other business needs – or to the special needs of your community.

Second, using Drupal Commons can consolidate infrastructure. Drupal is in use on over a million websites today, and it is fairly likely that there’s at least one Drupal website in operation at the organization of somebody reading this note! By basing your social business site on Drupal, you give your IT team leverage to manage what they already know. Even if you don’t have Drupal in your organization today, it’s rapid growth as a web platform means it could well be in your “mainstream website” future anyway; so Drupal Commons can be the vanguard of a consolidated future.

Finally, using Drupal Commons frees you from the tyranny of software license fees. Proprietary vendors survive by finding ways to get you to pay for software, then pay again at points in the future, such as at major upgrade time, or at a size bump, etc. Drupal Commons is open source, and the economics of open source are dramatically more favorable than proprietary alternatives.

4) Are you noting any big trends in web interactivity? Anything your client base seems particularly interested in these days?

The most interesting area to me, and the area we haven’t really yet explored in Drupal Commons, is game-ifying social interactions. In Drupal Commons, users earn points for posting content, making comments, updating their profile, etc. We see some users spending time making LOTS of contributions simply so they can be the top-dog in points on a site. Essentially, they are gaming the site for their own gratification.

While use behavior certainly drives contributions by specific members, the interesting question is how we could harness this “game-playing” type motivation to into positive rewards for all users. This can be used in areas like group innovation and ideation, where users can make proportionate bets (votes) on product ideas in order to get features they want. Or you can use virtual goods sales and barter to drive desired behaviors on the site.

While this isn’t yet a big trend, I see evidence that it’s a big potential trend. Some of our customers are doing some early experiments in this area, and learning what works, and what doesn’t. I think we’ll see more on this in the next 12-18 months.

5) What’s the five year view? Groups that are now using Commons – what do you think they will be asking for a few years down the road?

One word: Scalability. As groups get successful, all kinds of new issues arise. A successful externally-facing social site will become a target for Comment spammers trying to boost SEO for some site, leading to the need to fight comment spam. Social sites with very large active user counts will sap the capabilities of the infrastructure they’re initially deployed on, and organizations will need to react with more horsepower. And those are just the technical needs.

Separate from that will be the need for wise community management. Communities don’t assemble for the benefit of the site owner; they only have their own interests to serve. If a site successfully creates a community, organizations will need to have a healthy relationship with that community such that they let it continue to thrive, but still make sure it is serving the organizations purpose.

I don’t know how these get played out a few years from now. But fortunately, the Drupal Community itself encounters a lot of these kinds of issues before the wider world does, and I am confident that Drupal Commons will always have leading-edge tools to help organizations deal with the issues.

6) Any other comments on web interactivity?

Yup, one. Though we’ve definitely done some advance work for organizations by defining an information architecture for a social business site in Drupal Commons, user experience is still something that can be tuned in Drupal Commons – and organizations that want to be successful in their Commons deployment should plan on spending some time and paying for help to create a terrific user experience for their users. Social sites succeed or fail based on how easy and engaging the site is for its users, and each community is going to have different needs. This is why it’s so important to build a community on Drupal, because of the massive freedom Drupal gives you to do this.

Not to toot your horn inappropriately, but in my mind this is exactly where a partner like Forum One comes in. You guys know communities, and you have people dedicated to use experience design. It’s going to be crucial for Acquia’s customers to utilize our partners like Forum One to be successful with their Drupal Commons deployments. And I’m not just sayin’ that because it’s you asking the question! .