Neue Drupal Sites

This year in my keynote at DrupalCon San Francisco, I mentioned that the elephants are coming. Well, earlier this week Capgemini, one of the world's foremost consulting providers with 95,000 employees, announced a new service, Capgemini Immediate. I'm pleased to say that they're using Drupal as a foundational technology for their new Immediate platform.

Capgemini Immediate is an offering which helps organizations to build and run on-line services. It consists of a number of preferred technologies (i.e., Drupal, MySQL, Salesforce, Lithium, etc.), best practices, and an ecosystem of preferred partners of which Acquia is part.

Capgemini Immediate is already being well received and making news. The Royal Mail, the national postal service of the United Kingdom, has signed a large six-year IT contract with Capgemini to transform their on-line services using Capgemini Immediate. With almost 200,000 employees, Royal Mail is the second biggest employer in the UK. Signing of Royal Mail received significant press coverage, including the Wall Street Journal.

The Capgemini stamp of approval, and the fact that Royal Mail will be using Drupal, is tremendous news for all of us. If successful, it could be an important milestone in the history of Drupal -- similar to when Dell and IBM decided to ship machines with Linux pre-installed in 2007.

Incidentally, Capgemini is using Drupal to power their own 95,000 person intranet.

The New Flemish Alliance (Dutch: Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, abbreviated as N-VA) is using Drupal for their website: http://www.n-va.be. The N-VA is a Flemish political party. They became the largest party in both Flanders and Belgium in the 2010 federal elections a few weeks ago.

We all know that Drupal can work with Varnish, a HTTP accelerator that caches pages in virtual memory. Well, now Varnish uses Drupal too! Varnish Software, the company behind Varnish, just relaunched its site using Pressflow, a Drupal distribution with performance and scalability improvements. The site was built by Kodamera.

Leffe, one of my favorite Belgian abbey beers, is now using Drupal for their main website: http://leffe.com. Cheers to that!

The South African Government is using Drupal for their official 2010 FIFA World Cup website at http://www.sa2010.gov.za. With the start of the 2010 World Cup just hours away, this is a timely discovery and a nice win for Drupal. The site was built by eConsultant. (Hat tip: Usamah)

Christina Aguilera just relaunched her website using Drupal: http://www.christinaaguilera.com/. The site is developed by Sony Music, and is one of the better looking Drupal sites that I have seen Sony Music launch. No pun intended! Welcome to the family, Christina!

The United States Department of Commerce just relaunched their website on Drupal. Check out their new website at http://commerce.gov.

According to Wikipedia, the Department of Commerce has more than 140,000 employees, and an annual budget of $14 billion USD. Needless to say this is another great win for Drupal, and for Open Source in government!

It is great to see them take advantage of Drupal's social capabilities like blogging and commenting, as well as to see integration with social media like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. It all helps provide greater transparency.

Forrester Research, one of the most prestigious analyst and market research firms, is using Drupal for their corporate blogs. Flattered!

Via Rail, a large train operator in Canada, is now using Drupal for its main website. They carry approximately four million passengers annually so like with any train operator, their website is obviously key to their business.