Dropsolid experience platform - Optimised platform for open DXP

Dropsolid had many breakthroughs in the Drupal & Mautic universe in the last two years. In this post we'll discuss the opportunities for the company, the community and the partner ecosystem.

Sharing our strategy openly

I thought it was in everybody's best interest that we'd share our company strategy openly because we believe it is key to understand where we want to go.

The Platform basics explained
dropsolid platform

You might have seen that we have changed our tagline from "Dropsolid experience cloud" to "Dropsolid experience platform". This makes the update in vision very clear. It is 3 fold:

  1. We want to make clear that next to delivering Drupal as a DXP we also have brought our hosting & devops platform to the next level. We introduced containerised hosting, many new features that help you build DXPs with Drupal & Mautic and we introduced enterprise capabilities at SME prices.
  2. The world has changed and many organisations want to stay sovereign to stay free and don't want to be locked in. Our open DXP allows you to own the code, the data, the AI and the infrastructure. You can now run the open DXP on prem or in a hybrid way. To reflect that we dropped cloud from our tag line and changed it to platform. You can now host the most open DXP in a sovereign way.
  3. We believe the SME market wants an all in one open DXP out of the box. We believe the Drupal core engine is the best candidate. We also believe sailing Drupal into new blue ocean markets will be key to maintain the health of the business and partner ecosystem.

TLDR

  • Launching Dropsolid Experience Platform at DrupalCon, optimized for delivering DXPs and helping partners generate business by selling Drupal as a DXP.
  • Investing in the Drupal ecosystem through sponsorships, security team support, and Platinum membership.
  • Strategic partnerships sought with top Drupal companies around the world to build an open DXP community and enhance the Drupal core.
  • Long term Goal: Make Drupal the core of a fully open DXP for SMEs, reducing the need for integrations with proprietary platforms.
  • Investments in grants and profits reinvested into developing open-source capabilities for Drupal and Mautic.
  • Benefits for partners:
    • Leads through Dropsolid to deliver open DXP solutions.
    • Competitive advantage as early adopters of Drupal-based DXPs.
    • Stronger position in the Drupal ecosystem by contributing to open DXP development.
  • Long-term vision: Position Drupal as an open DXP and enable AI-driven, personalized digital experiences. Provide the platform optimised to run and deliver Drupal as an open DXP.

The win for the community

As you might have noticed Dropsolid is doing everything it can to invest in the Drupal ecosystem with: Platinum Partnership, the EU Drupalcon Diamond sponsorship, sponsoring many camps and the US Drupalcon, the D7 EOL, the investment in the security team, the investment in Starshot with a track lead, ...

We also upgraded our capabilities regarding ISO27001, modernised our hosting/devops platform towards container based architecture, released many new features for making developing Drupal based DXPs easier and also won some impressive customers over with the open DXP story. For example the: German government Bundesagentur für Arbeit, EASA, UZA and many more.

In the Mautic universe we did at the same time the same effort: sponsoring at the highest level, providing the free trial infrastructure worldwide, sponsoring on the product level the upgrade to 5.x through the product lead Mattias, sponsoring Anderson a core contributor with a massive upgrade in UX with Mautic 5.1 and being top contributor in the ecosystem.

To understand where the effort of Dropsolid could lead to, I'd like to share our vision & strategy. In the elections I already put forward the general idea. To make it a bit more tangible I wrote a blogpost on dreaming about the long term potential of Drupal. I believe the path for Drupal towards bluer oceans is there.

In short, all these contributions will lead to:

  • Increasing Drupals appeal in the SME market (= companies from 100 people to a couple of 1000, spending 100-500k on an open drupal based DXP implementation and 10ks-100ks on licences for DXP)
  • Attract new talent to the Drupal community: It would also keep our web/drupal talent engaged by allowing them to work with data and AI to enhance the user experience. They would become DXP developers. Our customers' web-masters would become DXP-masters.
  • Allowing the business ecosystem to position Drupal in new ways: And our web-agency would become a DXP-agency, differentiating us from regular agencies in a currently red ocean market.

I also realize the main focus in the community is to get Drupal Starshot out and reclaim lost territory in Drupal as a CMS market. The next focus should be to sail Drupal into the open DXP market through enhancing the core and packaging Drupal as an open DXP.

For me, the journey beyond going to the Moon and to going to Mars, is to get Drupal out there as an open DXP. I also think it will be a requirement to stay relevant in the crowded CMS market.

How to get there?

To get there we need a selected group of true Drupal focussed partners & the community. We are building this group. One of the first tries is to get the grant with Open Social who has a similar vision to build a CXP (community experience platform) on top of the open DXP engine which could be the Drupal core.

We want to do 2 things:

  • Get the group of companies together to help build the open Drupal DXP
  • Partner with this group of Drupal companies because we believe the Dropsolid experience platform is the platform that is best optimised to run Drupal as DXP and we have a unique story around sovereignty. Dropsolid is a truly open DXP unlike other DXPs that are only API-open.

To realise our dream to develop new Drupal core capabilities making open DXP possible.

How is Dropsolid already trying?

  • By applying for grants to contribute the missing key capabilities to the Drupal core.
    • We applied for the grant through the Eureka program with Open Social and are hopeful we'll get it.
    • We have won a 300k research grant to add AI sovereign to Drupal and DXP
    • Other grant sources
  • By investing the profits of Dropsolid into Drupal & Mautic contributions (see above).
  • By investing the revenue from our partnerships using the Dropsolid experience platform to build DXPs