Transcript

Sandro Groganz: Hi Jeff. Thank you for joining me for this interview.

Jeff Whatcott: Thank you.

Sandro Groganz: You are the Vice-President of Marketing at Acquia.

Jeff Whatcott: That's correct.

Sandro Groganz: Please tell me a bit about your role.

Jeff Whatcott: At Acquia, I run all of the marketing functions, from PR to product marketing, also product management and evangelism, as well as our community relations aspect, which we all put under one tent – marketing.

Sandro Groganz: And I guess you do that because community is an important part of the word-of-mouth marketing?

Jeff Whatcott: Yes, that's essential. We're an open source company that's building a business around an existing open source project, in Drupal. And so, community is the water that we swim in, like fish. It is something that has brought Drupal to the point that it's at right now, and it's what will take it forward. It's an inherent part of everything we do in marketing. It is promoting the community, working with the community, making sure that we get leverage from the community and provide leverage to the community.

Sandro Groganz: The Drupal community is already very large, and it was there before Acquia came into play. How do you relate to the community?

Jeff Whatcott: We do it in several different ways. One, we wanted to make sure when we originally launched the company, we made clear to everyone that we weren't going to try to change the way the community operated, and that we weren't going to try to assert any control over the community. Because Dries, who is the original creator of Drupal – you know, he's the Linus Torvalds of Drupal – is our CTO, some people were concerned that perhaps he would start exercising more direct control over the project and Acquia, this commercial entity, would somehow have control. First thing we did, was make sure everyone knew that wasn't going to be the case, that we were very friendly to the community and that we considered ourselves to be a member of the community - a citizen if you will, not the mayor of the community. And that was a really key thing we did, to start.

The other thing is that we see ourselves as having a beneficial role in helping the community be more successful. So one thing we've done is, we've helped organize what we call "code sprints", where we will pick a topic that's important for advancing Drupal technology, we'll announce the date, we'll provide some materials and a place to meet, and we'll invite developers from the community to come together and just code together for a whole week. It's good for advancing Drupal technology and we, as a vendor, can step in and provide all of the facilities to make that happen. So it helps the open source project move along.

Sandro Groganz: There is an existing community that is large. Acquia has venture capital – about $7m, as far as I know. So how do you monetize on top of that community?

Jeff Whatcott: What we have to do – because the software is free and always will be free – is finding things that people are willing to pay for, other than the software. And it happens that there are a lot of those.

One is certainly technical support. Although the community provides pretty good support, it doesn't have the accountability that you have when there's a vendor. Which means that if I want an answer and I want it right now, you can't get the community to guarantee you that, because it's all volunteers. So, we can step in and say, when that kind of situation happens, we'll be the vendor who's accountable to provide you an answer to your question. Your question could be that, "Something's broken!", or it could be that, "I don't know quite how to do this, give me some advice." And there's a huge need for that in the community, because the software moves so fast, the documentation sometimes has a hard time keeping up and so, having experts who, on the phone or over email, can answer questions for customers, turns out to be really valuable.

Buy beyond that, we're looking for other things that we can sell, like hosted services that complement what people are doing with Drupal on their own servers. For example, spam-blocking, we just announced recently that we're going to have a hosted search offering. These are things that we can provide through the cloud to somebody who's operating a Drupal site, to help make their search run better, to keep spam off their site, to keep their site up-to-date. We do offer update reporting and notifications. Those are things that make sense to pay for, but they don't lock you in to having a certain kind of software. We think that's the right model to have.

Sandro Groganz: You call that the "service and support" model?

Jeff Whatcott: We call it "software and services". You know, because some people say "software as a service" is the thing and we think there's a place for that. But many people are going to continue to have software on their own servers, because they want the control, they want the integration, and they want to be able to have all the freedom that open source software gives you. That's great, but there are some things that are efficient to provide from the cloud. So we call it "software and services".

Sandro Groganz: So that's how you intend to bridge the gap, or the problem, between critical data that you want to keep in your on-premise installation but you want to leverage the benefits of a "software as a service" offering?

Jeff Whatcott: That's right. For example, the spam-blocking service that we offer has some really interesting network effects in that, because it's in the cloud and it's blocking spam for a lot of different sites, it gets smarter and smarter the more people that are using it. And that centralized repository of information about what's spam and what's not, it makes really good sense to have it in one place, and then that benefits everyone who's using it.

Sandro Groganz: The network effect is an interesting aspect and the recently-offered "search appliance", or however you call it, is there a network effect as well?

Jeff Whatcott: Well, it's really a hosted search – that's what we call it – and we haven't really launched it yet. It's still in pre-alpha, will be in beta early next year. But there's a network effect there as well. Obviously, if it's private data that we're searching, then you want to keep that secure and we’re building into the service the ability to keep that secured. But in some cases, you have data on your site that might be useful to show up on another site, and have it syndicated. And what we can do with search is, we can obviously search all the information on your site and show you related content that you might be interested in, on your site. But once we have all that data indexed, we could theoretically, down the road, provide you additional content that you might be interested in, from another site. So it enables interesting content syndication in the context of search. The search results and the content can be blended across different sites, which we think could be interesting.

Sandro Groganz: Tim O'Reilly said that the important part about Web 2.0 is the data. You're a software services provider on top of Drupal. Now you also become a data provider?

Jeff Whatcott: Yeah, it worked out pretty well for Google so far! So maybe it will work out well for us.

We are dedicated to making this work for Drupal. What makes our search so valuable, is that it's highly Drupal-aware and Drupal-optimized. So when you do a search, we can have you drill down in that search by tags, and taxonomy terms, and users, and say, "I want to see all the posts on my site by Sandro about the topic of marketing". And that really allows you to get down to the content that you’re looking for. Then also, here's the related information that may be from some other site on the same thing. We think there're some interesting effects there, for sure.

Sandro Groganz: And the search is based on Lucene, which is implemented in Java. So you can also leverage the potential of other open source projects which are not written in PHP, like Drupal is?

Jeff Whatcott: Absolutely! That's what made this process so interesting. We're able to put together Lucene, open source software, we’re able to leverage cloud platforms that are emerging, which makes the operations much more efficient. It's a really exciting time out there, with the open platforms that are happening.

Sandro Groganz: Are you thinking about opening up that service to non-Drupal content management systems?

Jeff Whatcott: It's an interesting thing. We haven't committed to that yet, but it's something that we're looking at and we'll have to see where it goes from there. First, we need to get the Drupal version successful.

Sandro Groganz: I was asked via Twitter to ask you: how do you, from a marketing perspective, convince your customers that there is a return on investment in open source, given that there's a lot of hands-on work that you need to do to customize it?

Jeff Whatcott: Well, you have to look at the total cost of your project. And the total cost of your project normally would include some software acquisition costs, which goes to zero with open source. Then it would include the development cost and maintenance cost over time. And you have to put all that together and decide what your site's going to produce for you in terms of benefit and evaluate that relative to cost.

Now, with open source, we can say that the software is free, but then the other parts of your project, how are you going to be successful with that? If you don't have support, there's a good chance that your developers could get blocked by a bug, or an issue, or just a lack of knowledge on their part. That can end up increasing those costs. If you have access to support during development, we can help collapse that development cost and make sure that you don't get blocked.

Then, after you go live, if you have a site problem that brings your site down, or causes a security issue, or a usability issue that could damage your brand, there's a downside to that. And so, what we say is, we can help reduce the risk of those things happening, all of which have a significant cost. So, our ROI is about helping you reduce the total cost of the project. And software alone is only part of the picture.

Sandro Groganz: So you're in a high-volume business, with your large community already right from the start. How do you deal with all the leads that you're getting?

Jeff Whatcott: Yes, it's been amazing to watch the traffic on acquia.com go through the roof. Ever since we've been in business, it's significantly grown, and now we have downloads available. We've gathered hundreds of leads, thousands of leads, and they're just coming through, and how do you qualify those?

What we've done is, we've used a package called LoopFuse, which is a marketing automation system that actually tracks users to our site, allows us to then identify those users, and then start giving people scores based on what they are doing on the site. So when they sign up for a trial subscription with us, they get a few points that increases their score. Or, when they download a white paper from us, that also increases their score. If they come back to the site many, many times, showing an ongoing interest, then that increases their score. And if they set up a trial subscription and then they never actually come back, we score those people lower than people who actually come back again and again and again, that are actively using their subscription. We also score them based on what industry you're in, what level you're at, and whether you tell us that you're interested, like "I have a project right now".

Based on all that information, we're able to score people and send them over to the sales team, not as a raw, unknown person, but as a person with their whole history: they've come to the Web site, they've been there multiple times. And we give that information, so that when the salesperson calls up, they're getting more successful, because they're calling people who are really interested. And they're able to call up knowing who this person is and have more friendly conversations, than just introducing them like they've never known them before. And that is very, very interesting and promising, because it allows us to find the needles in the haystack.

Sandro Groganz: So you're experiencing first-hand that you're not selling your product...they're buying it from you?

Jeff Whatcott: That's right. We have more work to do to optimize all these systems, but it allows us to not have to be so pushy, in terms of calling people. They can engage with us, and then we only have to talk to the people who are interested, which is who the salespeople want to talk to, and those are the people who want to be contacted. I think we're entering a new era, where you have conversational relationship marketing that has a long-running set of micro-interactions, as opposed to a big sales pitch. I think it works better, it's more fun as a marketer, and it works better for the customer.

Sandro Groganz: So you've been working at Adobe before, and Adobe also has some open source projects, like the one that you also led. Is it true that you can save sales and marketing dollars with the open source business model?

Jeff Whatcott: Absolutely! What that means is, with open source, people have access to the software, they can try it, they can get experience with it, they can decide if it meets their needs, without you having to spend any money, which is wonderful! That's good for them, and it's good for the marketer. The last thing you want to do is be talking to people who are spending a lot of money, convincing people to use something that is not a good fit for them. And open source helps get that out of the way. So yeah, as a marketer, it's very ideal.

As a marketer with open source, I think that sometimes you have to adjust your thinking in that, it's perfectly OK for someone to use your software, and to try it without paying for it. If they're not going to buy anything eventually, anyway, why do you want to talk to them? It filters things out. So I think, properly applied, it's a great model.

Sandro Groganz: What's your guess, how much do you actually save with the open source business model?

Jeff Whatcott: Boy, it’s hard to say! I would say you probably save 75-80% of the marketing expense in terms of acquisition on a customer because again, you're only talking to the people who are really interested, in an ideal situation.

Sandro Groganz: Is there a trend you see in open source marketing? Do you see anything that will change, or that will become more important, in the next few years?

Jeff Whatcott: I think one trend, generally, is that more and more software is going to open source, for sure. In terms of open source marketing specifically, I think that more companies are going to do what we're doing, in terms of finding services in addition to the software, that they can offer from the cloud to customers. So the line between "software as a service" and "open source" is blurring a little bit. I think those are going to merge together in ways that make a lot of sense for customers. That's one important trend that I would see.

Although those things are coming together, the fact that you're always able to take the software and your data and put it on your own servers if you want, at no charge, with no control from the vendor, is something that is a fundamental value proposition that open source people will see for some time.

Sandro Groganz: The CMS market is quite crowded, and there are a lot of open source CMS alternatives. You started to position Drupal as a "social publishing" software, which is a new category. Why did you do that, and how did you come to that term, "social publishing"?

Jeff Whatcott: It's interesting. Obviously as a marketer, you're looking for, "What market are we playing in? What category are we in?" It was interesting when I talked to people who used Drupal. You talked to ten people and asked them, "What is Drupal? What category of software does it fit in?" Two would say, "a Web framework". Two other people would say, "Well, it's my blogging platform". Others would say that it's a "content management system". You get different answers from different platform. And then, I found that on drupal.org and the community generally, there was not a lot of consensus about what it was.

And I thought about that for a while and I realized that, actually, they're all right! Drupal is a representation of a real phenomenon that's going on in the market. It's not centrally planned. Drupal is just a reflection of the needs that people have. And what the needs actually are, "I need a Web site. I need that Web site to implement all the Web 2.0 patterns. I need blogging. I need to have forum discussions. I need to have content management. I need to have a Web framework that allows me to do something a little custom, like I have a new custom content type that I want to do. I need all these things together in a Web site." And that's what Drupal has naturally, organically evolved into.

That's not content management in its classical sense. It's something different. It's about bringing people together, allowing them to interact online, share information. So we realized we needed a new word for that. We looked at several words and we proposed "social publishing", because it's about "social" in that it's inherently about people sharing information bi-directionally, not just a company sharing information from "us" to "you", but "you" talking back to "us" and having a conversation. And "publishing" because everybody's publishing – not just an organization, but its employees are publishing – everybody has a blog, everybody is a participant. It's a community platform, in a way. And that's the word we came up with.

And so far, it's got a lot of legs – I've seen other vendors using that word, I see analysts starting to talk about it. And if you look at the fundamental trend, all of those things are coming together. Blogging vendors are starting to add content management functionality. Forum vendors are doing the same. Content management vendors are adding blogging. This is a clear center of gravity that everybody is gravitating towards.

Sandro Groganz: From a marketing perspective, it's of course a clever move to define your own category. That allows you to position you as a leader in that category, if you invented that category in some way. But of course, you now have the duty to have others accept that category, like analysts. What do you do to achieve that?

Jeff Whatcott: I did the same thing with Flex when we were originally introducing the concept of Rich Internet Applications - that was a word that we introduced at Macromedia back in 2004. The way we did that then, and the way we're doing it now with social publishing is, you can't just run in there and say, "you need to start using this word". You need to convince the analysts that there really is a trend there, and show them the trends, and do that again and again and again, and then you put a name on it consistently, every time. You don't make a big deal about the name. You just say, "we call this social publishing".

It was interesting, I was talking to an analyst here at the show just yesterday and she was remarking to me that she sees these trends now, much more than she did the first time we brought it up. But now, she's really seeing it in the marketplace. The label we've put on that is "social publishing", so they start to use it. You have to be gentle about it and have a consistent approach to introducing a new term into the marketplace. But so far, so good.

Sandro Groganz: Messaging can be a very hard part of marketing. Did you have two-week-long workshops on the category, or how did you find it?

Jeff Whatcott: Well, you know, we’re a startup. So we don't have two-week-long workshops on anything. Frankly, we talked about this issue of needing the category definition for some time, as a rolling conversation. And I sat down with my marketing director, and frankly, it came out of his mind. We sat down, we looked at several different options, and picked the one that seemed to be the best, wrote that into our slides as we went out for our first analyst tour, and we've stuck with it.

Sandro Groganz: Thank you very much, Jeff, for some great answers!

Jeff Whatcott: Thank you. It's great to be here!