Let me start by saying that right now is the defining moment for Drupal as it pertains to establishing its future as a contender in the enterprise market. Drupal celebrated its 10 year anniversary this pas week which was highlighted by the successful production launch of Drupal 7 towards the end of 2010. Dries (the original creator of Drupal) delivered Tuesday's keynote address in the morning and talked about the fundamental changes of Drupal 7, thanked everyone in the community for their contributions to the platform, and then talked about what needed to change in the development process so innovation could happen faster. I've included the presentation below in it's entirety:

Perhaps what intrigued me about this presentation was the focus of better process for faster/reliable versions of Drupal and then the immediate focus of Drupal 8. Drupal 8 will fundamentally shift towards a mult-platform usbaility focus that basically considers the desktop/laptops last. In orders to support this Dries flooded the packed conference hall with detailed usability studies, graphs of platform use, and real world case studies. As a former developer and today a CEO I recognized immediately what was taking place.

Like all platforms Drupal was truly at a point of critical mass. A platform created, developed, and maintained (for the most part) exclusively by developers found themselves sharing a conference with business analysts, project managers, and executives. Drupal (much like Magento) has found itself no longer competing with platforms such as WordPress, Joomla!, or DotNetNuke (DNN) but with IBM, Microsoft, SiteCore, Ektron, and Interwoven (now Autonomy) which represent enterprise solutions. The good news is regardless of proprietary software costs, Drupal remains the leader in providing an ever adapting WCMS/social platform. On the flip side of that, the reality is that firms like Unleashed Technologies must continue to drive the market place and persuade more traditional leadership to evaluate how they interview software solutions. We must surge ahead and make Drupal 8 ready within the next 12 months distancing the solution so significantly from the pack there is no comparison against high cost, low value solutions such as the previously mentioned platforms. 

The future of Drupal is well-defined. It will be the first widely adopted open source WCMS in the enterprise market place that will provide significant advantages for those smart enough to realize it first.