Why you should attend Drupal Camp India in August 2008 ?

If you are a Drupal Development shop or an end client using Drupal CMS or an interactive agency looking to move some of the new and existing clients to Drupal, you should seriously consider attending Drupal Camp India.

Outside of United States, India has the largest Drupal Community and this community is growing every day. Drupal is a fantastic platform which any Web start-up can use to build their product. Today the world is going through many economic challenges i.e. stock market crash, rising inflation, rising crude prices, labour costs to name a few. Developing a Web property in Drupal Content Management Framework does require certain degree of expertise otherwise your project can see lot of delays. Well, when you have a large team, costs can go out of control. Outsourcing if managed well can help you with some of these issues.

India has well established IT processes and has a young talent pool that can be tapped by many organizations. One solution maybe to take on Project Management and Interactive Design piece within your organization internally and then outsource the site building part offshore. This is very well established model in Drupal Community and many companies are doing it. There are many reasons for this.

1. Leading Drupal shops have got brilliant Drupal developers. They have always led the innovation track which has made Drupal - the most respected open source CMS. They have built many high traffic showcase sites. As they continue to innovate and take on large enterprise clients, they also have a challenge to continue the support of the finished products. In one scenario, they hand over the site maintenance to the end client. If the client has ongoing development needs - needing lot of tweaking, customizations and ongoing support, it becomes a challenge to manage this relationship. Such shops can reach out Indian developers and development houses and build strong relationship with them to provide ongoing maintenance to such clients.

2. Many clients cannot afford to hire full time development resources at North American rates to support the site. India based development houses do provide good options for ongoing support. One option, they may consider is a long term relationship under Business Incubation model. This way, they are in more control of the resources and can direct them with minimal vendor intervention.

3. Many Drupal sites are still running on 4.x versions and have not got resources to upgrade the site to latest versions. With Drupal 6 release, most new development is happening on Drupal 6 and some clients may want to use some of the new modules but they have a challenge to upgrade their site which is generally a very labour intensive task and also need someone to have solid Drupal expertise. Indian based companies can pull in required resources to help in migration work.

4. Large enterprises and start-ups with unique ideas have needs that are complex and in many cases they find that Drupal Code base (Core and contributed) not have modules that meet their needs. Some of this require lot more research and customization of Drupal. This is more risk. Such tasks of Proof of Concept can be moved over to Offshore Company.

Besides these are many other advantages of forming partnership with Indian enterprises. Drupal Camp India aims to bring together a large pool of Drupal and Open Source talent together in this event. This camp will not only spread Drupal Knowledge in India and thereby increase its penetration in Indian markets but for those International companies who tap on Indian talent early on - will be able to scale their business faster than their competition.