The Drupal community has a long history of small, independent agencies providing development and consulting services. Many of these agencies have — understandably — laser-targeted their Drupal development efforts with the highest level of skill and professionalism. After all, it makes sense: like any platform, Drupal has a learning curve. Once you’ve surmounted it, there’s no shortage of work building big sites with Drupal, and this shows no sign of slowing down.

For the first few years of its existence, Alley Interactive was an all-Drupal agency — until a major client asked us to rebuild their site using WordPress, and we took the plunge into enterprise WordPress development. Since then, we’ve gained experience and contacts in both the Drupal and WordPress worlds. We’ve hired Drupal specialists and WordPress specialists, and we’ve talked to clients who sought our experience specifically because we have a foot in both doors. This process has not moved us away from Drupal — in fact, we’ve continued to pursue Drupal projects as actively as ever.

This talk will cover the evolution of a consulting company from a Drupal-focused agency to a media sector-focused agency. We’ll detail how the firm has adapted through the years — from our sales process to our developer culture to our overall outlook, all of which now encompass a broader view of the merits of open source web development.

We’ll discuss some of the technical and business lessons we’ve learned, and how our history and practices have made us more confident and robust in pitching and executing our Drupal projects. We’ll also cover some of the scenarios we’ve been asked to evaluate when determining which platform is most appropriate for a particular project — and when Drupal wins out.

The audience takeaways will be:

• Drupal is great.
• Some other platforms besides Drupal are great, too — and in different ways.
• Learning about other platforms will give you perspective on what Drupal is best for and how to get the most out of it for big, complex projects.
• Gaining that perspective will make your sales pitches to clients more powerful: you can speak with real authority about why Drupal is the right choice when you decide that it is.