Global leading enterprises, brands, governments, and universities are experiencing the power of Drupal to engage with their audience through their websites and beyond. In a quest to lead the digital transformation experience, Drupal helps them manage and deliver a host of content across channels and devices. 

Worldwide, the organizations are looking for a solution that will support their active community, growing businesses, and user experience. With technological innovations speeding up, be careful when you are choosing the CMS for your enterprise. 

Enterprises’ demands, stakeholders’ demands, future requirements - choosing the right technology is a tough call. However, more and more organizations are leveraging Drupal for enterprise website development. 

Fulfilling the business requirements as well as meeting the technical aspects, Drupal is used 7 times the number of top sites as its next two competitors combined (BuiltWith.com)

What is the Market Demand Like?

In one of its reports, Statista predicts the size of the enterprise content management (ECM) market worldwide to reach $67 billion by 2022.

The possible spike in the graph is likely due to digital transformation which has become a key strategy for every organization. In order to make the most of the data and information the focus is moving from managing content to using content to support process productivity with simple intuitive backend technology. 

In this scenario, the information control and governance features of Enterprise Content Management move to the background, and content presentation comes to the fore. 

Reliable, scalable, secure, flexible, presentation-friendly, future-proof to sustain the content without hampering the performance of your website. Can Drupal manage the unending list of demands? 

Drupal is Fostering Billion Dollar Businesses…

Drupal can manage, in fact, it is very well doing in that matter. Fostering billion dollar businesses under the aegis of its brand. The list includes names like Tesla Motors, The Economist, Puma, Pfizer, Timex, LO’real, Honda, Johnson and Johnson, and a million others. 

Drupal 8 rightly taps into the concentrated innovation from its open source community. 

Taking advantage from its open source community, Drupal derives the most value by being flexible while keeping its core robust without compromising on security providing with new capabilities for successful digital experiences.

Acknowledging that enterprise solutions often demand complex requirements, Drupal has it sorted for you.

5 Unconventional Reasons to Choose Drupal For Your Enterprise

With Drupal, you can build a powerful website that’s optimized for every device, personalized for every visitor, and integrates with all your marketing tools.

Here are some of the solid reasons which make Drupal an excellent candidate for the enterprise of any scale or vertical.

With the new technological developments, Drupal meets these unconventional market demands just right. 

1. Content Presentation with a Headless Architecture
   Customer experience is the new standard to measure the success of your online business, so much so that even the commerce is going headless. Supporting a headless architecture, Drupal can integrate frontend technologies like React and Angular to give a new dimension to the digital experience. Today, headless is destined to take user experience to a whole new level where the experience itself can be merchandised.
    
2. Balancing the Hardware-Software Relationship
   With changing demands, enterprises are entering new ways to distribute the content. The dramatic increase in smartphone usage and portable devices have triggered the emergence of stand-alone software apps. This requires an easy integration matrix between hardware devices (say an Apple Watch) and a data management system (software) to present the content in the desired format. This is especially important as a medical device CMS. 
    
3. Personalization with Machine Learning and Predictive UX
   Bringing together advanced analytic capabilities, data mining, real-time scoring, and machine learning enterprises are trying to discover patterns in data and forecast events to offer the best digital user experience. In fact, 65% of customers are more likely to shop at a store or online business that sent relevant and personalized promotions.
   
   For enterprises, machine learning has the ability to scale across a broad range of businesses. 

   Acquia Lift Connector, a Drupal module, offers integration with the Acquia Lift service and an improved user experience for web personalisation, testing and targeting directly on the front end of your website.

   It leverages machine learning to automatically recommend content based on what a user is currently looking at or has looked in the past. It has the feature of real-time adaptive targeting that refines segments while A/B helps in keeping the users engrossed with the content that resonates.

4. Chatbots to Drive the Business Value
   Providing a conversational UI that communicate with the users and is vital for an organization, you can't afford to miss Chatbots in your website. Understanding what users want to know, pass on the information to the backend, and provide them with quick and better responses. Chatbot API, in Drupal helps integrate chatbots with your website. 

5. Exploring Markets with AR and VR
   Drupal leads by an example when it comes to innovating with technologies outside of its periphery. By the year 2022, the market size of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality is forecasted to increase by humungous levels as can be seen in the graph below.

   

   
   Several examples of VR applications built on top of Drupal 8 have been presented in the community. One of the famous examples of VR built on Drupal is the 'The Drupal site of Massachusetts State University' (a fictional university).

   
   Augmented Reality has a lot to offer to different industries, with transportation, sports, education, and healthcare reaping the most benefits out of it. More recently with Google adding AR to its maps for a street view mode.

    

The Conventional Reasons to Opt for Drupal 

1. It is Easy To Build

   With Drupal 8.6 “quick-start” command, launching a Drupal site is easy in one command using only one dependency, PHP. Setting up a demo website no longer requires you to have setup a web server, a database, containers, or anything else.
   
   A fully functional Drupal demo application can be downloaded and installed in less than two minutes. 
   
   Providing easy-to-set-up solutions with distribution, the development time is cut by half. 
   
   Enabling companies to deploy core features and functionality rapidly, it allows easier customization as per their business requirements. It is easier to choose the layout and themes for your Drupal website, as themes and appearances are just a click away. With features simplified to make non-developers comfortable around Drupal, the editorial capabilities have been made fluent and easy.

2. Drupal is Secure
   
   Used by hundreds and thousands of websites, Drupal’s core, codes, and passwords are repeatedly encrypted and hashed to strengthen the life of your website.
   
    Supported by experts, and a large and continuously growing community, it has a dedicated security team to patch any probable security violation.
   
   Frequent Updates
   
   In case of any security update, the community ensures that you get notified the day patches are released. Security release windows are released every Wednesday for contributed projects, and the third Wednesday of every month for core, usually, for a fixed period of time.
   
   Even though the release window does not necessarily mean that a release will actually be rolled out on that date, it exists for the site administrators to know in advance the days they should look out for a possible security release.
   
   Security Modules
   
   In addition to the proven security of core, numerous contributed modules can strengthen the security of your website. These modules extend the security by adding password complexity, login, and session controls, increasing cryptographic strength, and improving Drupal' logging and auditing functions. Additional security modules like security kit, captcha, paranoia, Drupal Security Review can be used as a checklist to test and check for many of the easy-to-make mistakes making your site vulnerable.  
   
   Security Team and Working Group
   
   The security team works closely with the Drupal Security Working Group (SecWG), comprising dozens of experts from around the world to validate and respond to security issues, aim being - to ensure that core and contributed project system provides world-class security and provide security practices to community developers.
   
   Its core is designed to prevent any possible security breach. Vulnerabilities in the core are coordinated with branch maintainers and individual project maintainers respectively.
   
   Drupal has proven to be a secure solution for enterprise needs and is used by top-tier enterprises.

3. Drupal is Scalable and Flexible
   
   Another salient feature that makes it popular among businesses. When concerning web technology, enterprises require the ability to handle considerable traffic throughout - especially if it is a media and entertainment site.
   
   Drupal has stood both the test of time and traffic spike.
   
   Its ability to make the framework extensible via its modules and distributions is at the heart of much of its success. While it has enabled the core to sustain the bulk of the content, its way to streamline the demands of new industries by allowing them to address their needs in the form of custom modules and distributions has given it more satisfactory customer reviews. 
   
   One matter that addresses the worries of enterprises is the cost of maintenance. Many government and non-government organizations have migrated to Drupal to avoid the licensing and maintenance cost of the proprietary systems.  

4. Excels at Faster and Responsive Development
   
   According to Google’s official statement, more than 50% of search queries globally now come from mobile devices. People want to be able to find answers as fast as possible and various studies have proved that people really do care about the loading speed.
   
   And that is why a recent Google release says that page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches from July 2018. It’s high time that you take the combination of performance and mobile responsiveness as a serious factor for improving visibility and revenue from the web. It is very important to have an AMP friendly website. 
   
   Drupal 8 is built for a mobile-first world. Everything in version 8 supports mobile responsive design. Its admin and default designs are responsive for both developers and content authors providing a responsive front-end theming framework.
   
   Increasing the loading speed of your web page opens numerous doors for business. And when users can view your Drupal website the same way on a desktop and mobile devices you cannot be having second thoughts.
   
   Mobile responsiveness helps you deliver the optimal mobile visitor experience. It supports the best responsive design practices and ensures that your users get a coherent experience anytime and every time.  

5. Supports Multi-site Functionalities
   
   Given that your organization is running more than one site, the maintenance and management would require big bucks and time. But with the multi-site feature you can share one single Drupal installation (which includes core code, contributed modules, and themes) among other several sites.
   
   Enterprises, this way, can handle complex requirements from a single Drupal installation which implies that less time and resources are required to build your network of websites.
   
   One can manage any number of sites across their organization or brand, crossing geographies and campaigns from a single platform that allows swift and uncomplicated site creation and deployment.
   
   This is particularly useful for managing the core code since each upgrade only needs to be done once. While each site will have its own database and configuration settings to manage their own content, the sites would be sharing one code base and web document root.
   
   The multisite feature can be used for sites with the same features and functionalities. But if you have different functionalities it is better to test each site independently.

Drupal For Every Enterprise

Realizing the needs of every industry is different, Drupal has something for everyone.

Media and entertainment

Editing and Scalability

Media and entertainment websites worldwide use Drupal for their online platforms for seamless editing and scalability. The list of over one million organizations includes The Economist, ET Online, MTV(UK), The Grammy, The Emmy, The Weather.com, The Beatles, and Warner Bros Music.

Scalability is all about quantity - how many requests and amount of information you can handle at any given time without breaking or bending. Supporting some of the world’s most visited sites, Drupal is the other name of scalability.

Allowing easy content editing and management, which media and entertainment websites look for, it provides it all with WYSIWYG and CKEditor without another weighty feature.

SaaS

Community solutions:

SaaS enterprises are using Drupal to build the platform for their product as well as a community to engage with the clients and followers. It is easy to develop the platforms and then keep on adding the features in the later phase.

Given that community platforms are one of the key needs of SaaS organizations which allow the domain for the prospects and help the product and community to grow alike, distributions like OpenSocial offer great help.

Zoho is one of the SaaS products using Drupal for its community platforms.

E-commerce

E-commerce functionalities

Providing easy payment gateway to conduct online transactions, Drupal ensures the customer information passes seamlessly and remains safe.

Its core commerce payment module and distributions (Drupal commerce and Commerce KickStart) support the payment API, for a smooth payment collection procedure, through the check out form.

Supporting Paypal Express Checkout and Paypal Credit along with Amazon Pay, it lets you reach a wider audience by letting your shoppers complete the payment and shipping information stored on their Amazon accounts.

Lush is a Drupal patron. 

Tour and travel

For a potential traveler, your site shouldn’t look like just-another-information-brochure on the web. The need for an end-to-end solution to integrate all the minute details (from hotel booking to landing back) has never been greater.  

Booking Engine:

Providing two of the best booking solutions for your website:

• EasyBooking - Distribution
• BAT - Module

A complete solution for your vacation portal, BAT allows you to build an exclusive booking engine for a better customer relationship management. And EasyBooking gives a set of options to your visitors to make room reservations, contact hotel administration, or just sign-up for the hotel’s newsletter to be aware of the special offers and discounts.

FMCG

Theming

A design which resonates with your brand, interests and engages with your visitors is what you should indulge your resources in developing.

It’s the psychological effect which drives the visitor to make a transaction or to explore provided possibilities throughout the interface. Every landing page matters.

Regardless of your showcased products, Drupal themes provide sound navigation throughout the categories and sections with in-built hero banners’ section and pop-ups which are definitely customizable.

Additional modules can be further used to build an industry-specific theme. In order to cope up with varied demands, it provides more than two thousand easy and free to use themes on the go.

WholeFoods is built on Drupal.

Government and Non-Government

Cost and Security:

In 2012 when the Georgian government shifted to Drupal, the first reason to dump its previous CMS (Vignette) was its rising maintenance costs. 

Running a total of 65 state websites on two different versions of this proprietary system proved to be costly in the long run

Another decisive factor for government websites, uncompromised security is why government organizations are opting for Drupal. Around 150 governments are already powered by it. Just like the Georgian government, costs have been a significant factor affecting the choice of government and non-government agencies.  

Higher Education

Distributions:

To quickly build your higher education website, distributions provide an easy opportunity to build the website halving the development time and providing quick features. Opigno and OpenEDU are two of the distributions used widely by the higher-ed websites.

Drupal is most widely used CMS in the education sector no wonder why top international universities like the Harvard, Brown, Yale, Pennsylvania, and Columbia rely on it.

Harvard and Oxford are built on Drupal. 

HealthCare and Life Sciences

Content and User access control:

It can conform to any workflow that can be programmed with just a few configurations available. You can identify different types of content such as text, images, comments, file attachments, and any other information on your website for easy content integration and management.

Pfizer, a leading pharma organization is built on Drupal. 

Drupal As an Enterprise Management System

The need for an intranet system cannot be emphasized enough. For your business to grow by leaps and bounds, it is necessary to establish clear communication within your organization.

As your business expands, the need for an intranet system which can help in storage and sharing of data increases. ECMS is different from the web content management system in the way that the former is specifically designed for enterprise websites and is more dynamic.

Drupal allows building ECMS in two ways, either by using its modules and features or with the third party configuration. Its integration capabilities help the website to serve as a central content management system integrated with other necessary advancements.

Drupal Is Easier To Manage

Drupal isn’t hard to use, but it can be hard to learn how to use. Even though it requires more technical experience it is capable of producing exceptionally advanced sites. There is a WYSIWYG editor and drag-and-drop functionality to ease out the process and help you start straight away.

The release of version 8 has made the platform easier to use even for non-developers(and it includes content authors). Managing your website is easy as the community platform provides you with necessary documentation and answers in case you get stuck.

Summary

Being one of the leading technologies in the market, Drupal gives your enterprise the features and flexibility to innovate as per your visitor behavior and preferences.

We’d love to hear your thoughts. To get in touch, drop a mail at [email protected] and let us know how we can enhance your statistics with Drupal.