At the OSCMS conference, I stood up in a room full of people and went down through the list of concerns I've collected from corporate Drupal customers. Many people came up afterwards and told me to post it. This is that list.

While these concerns are always as varied as the clients and projects we're working on, the basics are always the same. This post is a summary of my notes over the last year talking to really large customers about Drupal.

General concerns: maturity and scalability

Customers are concerned about the economic maturity of the Drupal CMS marketplace, and it's ability to handle larger projects. I'm often pointed to Apache or Redhat, both of whom are or actively support large scale consultancies. I also spend a great deal of time listening to people complain about problems with performance & scalability.

I have found many of these concerns come down to problems customers have experienced with Drupal and MySQL specifically.

Other common concerns

• Support Models: After my product is built, how will I support it. What are the costs, and what are the major vendors in the Drupal marketplace capable of handling my large project?
• Risk Mitigation & Reduction: How do I mitigate the risk of project failure? What example can you point me to of successful projects?
• Speed of Development: How do I integrate Drupal's 6 month (and faster) release cycle, when my company is moving at "X" (where "X" is slower) speed.
• ROI: How do I measure ROI on Drupal? What other platforms compare to Drupal, and what should I evaluate?
• Sharepoint: Is Drupal a competitor?

So, without further ado, The WorkHabit Enterprise 15:

• Hiring new talent: inability to get top talent
• Investment required to use it, and the ongoing investment to keep using it
• 6 month release cycle is too short for Enterprise software
• Backwards compatibility
• Permissions and specifically corporate policy enforcement
• Size of the development groups are too small to handle larger projects
• It's only "suitable for intranet applications": enterprise apps are still struggling to adapt to things like Redhat and Web 2.0. These massive changes that are capable in platforms like Drupal are a pretty big leap for less than agile climbers.
• Lack of best practices for Drupal - where are the white papers?
• Scalability & performance needs to be well explained
• Lack of off the shelf supported integration for Active Directory or other auth methods. Want a "black box" that "just works"
• Lack of a roadmap leads to trepidation for project investors
• Nobody is billing themselves as enterprise: communications disconnect and to that point - no sales agents - who do I talk to?
• Conceptually difficult for non-technical users - training is difficult to find.
• Democratic process confuses and counfounds companies who are used to top down decision making
• Little or no attention is paid to compliance and compliance issues

The fact is that enterprise customers that are implementing Drupal are right at the edge of technology for Enterprise. The vast majority of Enterprise software, especially in the CMS space, is struggling to integrate the technologies and models in Drupal. The CMS vendors are following their customers.

I have no conclusion here. I was just asked to share the notes by several people in the room.