I was skimming the twitter stream and came across a reference to this article, http://think.workatplay.com/content/how-convince-your-boss-why-drupal-be.... The article got me thinking about how and where Drupal fit into the enterprise. Our campus has been engaged in a formal Request for Proposal (RFP) process to find a vendor that can meet some 300 individual requirements gathered through extensive outreach by the project team.
Definitions of enterprise are where the comparison issues begin. For example, in our typical approach we'd ask ourselves if we can find another campus doing exactly what we want to do. It's the exactness that drives more questions; are they a similar size?, do they have the same IT staffing?, etc.
After long debates and a complex RFP process, the Vice Chancellors of IT and University Relations landed on a decision for Hannon Hill's Cascade Server. I had worked with a team to develop pro-Drupal arguments, but that effort wasn't compelling enough to overcome our central IT group's conservative approach to running a 24x7 service. There were a few key points that I thought you might be able to use in your evangelist role, to help who ever comes next.
* Enterprise scalability. While it's true that Drupal has some huge sites, our team wasn't satisfied with the research materials I could come up with for scaling. (can't find the URL right now). It's a bit irrational, since we're no where near as large as some commercial sites, but the pro-proprietary folks use quotes from Dries regarding the difficulties in scaling as justification. I'm pretty sure he's referencing the technical effort that is needed to do enterprise site scaling (db sizing, tuning, replication, failover) , may not be found in your average small business. Unfortuneately, many of those skills aren't easily found in the U.
Suggestion. This issue might be mitigated with additional white papers on how U based systems that central serve large numbers are architected and delivered.
http://buytaert.net/scaling-with-mysql-replication
http://think.workatplay.com/content/how-convince-your-boss-why-drupal-be...
http://www.optaros.com/blogs/drupal-scalability