Gartner Calls Drupal a Visionary in Social Software Magic Quadrant

By Chelsi Nakano | Published Nov 2, 2009

Call analyst firm Gartner, ask for technology adoption advice, and you may walk away with a new appreciation for Drupal (news, site).

Reportedly thanks to Acquia and the Drupal team's endless efforts to maintain healthy relationships with analysts, Dries Buytaert's CMS baby was added to the 'Visionaries' section of Gartner's Magic Quadrant last month. As their name sits quaintly next to huge players like Google, it looks like the system is going places:

Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace

[Editor's Note: Check out our 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share report for details on the 20 most popular open source content management systems.]

From Player to Visionary

According to Gartner, Drupal did well enough last year in its intended area of the market to merit a 'niche player' title. This year however they've managed to break the mold. Says Nikos Drakos, Research Developer at Gartner:

"Drupal is in the Visionaries quadrant because of its use of the open source model to drive adoption and popularity, while providing enterprise services via organizations such as Acquia. Its strong content-centric, community and web application foundation is being rapidly extended with hundreds of modules, including many for collaboration and social interaction support."

Hard Work Pays Off

"This is exactly why I started Acquia," said Buytaert in his blog post about the promotion. He goes on to point out that other popular niche solutions such as WordPress and Joomla! are nowhere to be found on Drupal's graph, "probably because they have not been able to position themselves with analyst firms."

What do you think? Could WordPress and the rest of the niche gang learn a thing or two from Buytaert's strategy, or is there something else to Drupal's game-other than great social skills-that's getting them the attention? Perhaps we're about to find out.

Somehow, between scoring desirable titles and impressing analysts, the Drupal team has been working hard on the Drupal 7 release. Though the Code Freeze phase was projected to last until November 15th, Buytaert recently extended the date to December 1st.

As they close in on an official release, it's important for the Drupal community to show inevitable newcomers (via Gartner's praise) a platform worth committing to. So, for all you interested parties out there, follow Drupal 7's progress here and be sure to report all those pesky bugs.