Coming a full-circle : Acquia Engage Award for Srijan
Srijan wins the prestigious Acquia Engage Award 2020 under the category “Open Source Giants”
One of my colleagues wrote this to me on Slack:
From a small startup struggling to pay the rent to “Open Source Giant”!
You must be really happy RD
Congratulations
Way to go!
This was a really touching note which came in earlier today. Sometimes in the day-to-day focus you forget to notice how far along you’ve come. Perhaps had this note not come in, just before i was to formally sit and write a post around the winning of this award, i would have missed probably missed to relish the success of the journey thus far.
“Do the right things and the right things happen to you!”
This statement by my Guru, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev has literally seeped into ‘my being’ over the last 12 years — since i first completed the ‘Inner Engineering’ program.
As a business owner, worries and anxieties of the future are always aplenty. But beyond a point they do not bother me. This strength comes from this simple belief that if you focus your energy on ‘doing the right things’ right now in the present moment, ‘right things will surely happen to you’ in the future.
This same principle applies for lack of clarity of where to go. I have developed a firm belief that if you do the best with what you can see currently (with what you have at hand), and Life has a way of opening new doors and windows for you (new opportunities), which you never thought were possible or even ever imagined.
Push for Accelerators
Our push for building ‘accelerators’ at Srijan came in June 2019 by our business coach during an offsite as a way for finding non-linear revenue for Srijan.
The development of EzContent
I always credit Life for creating ‘serendipitous events’ to further the intent and focus. One such event came along when a potential financial services client asked an Acquia-Srijan team to see if Drupal offered a highly decoupled frontend theme and layout building experience.
An engineering team was put in place and what was produced was extraordinary. While we did not win the client contract, we did not stop from building on from what we had at hand — an early stage prototype of what could potentially become a Drupal distribution.
Commitment to open source
Our commitment to open source has remained since our tryst with open source way back in 2003–2004. We’ve always not only been consumers of open source, but at every given opportunity, been contributors to open source. We may have been inconsistent in our contribution but we’ve been consistent in our commitment.
COVID : Turning a crisis into an opportunity.
As the lockdowns started which hit businesses globally, Srijan was quite badly hit as well. With the large Drupal bench at hand, we decided to put up a solid cross-functional engineering team led by our Drupal consulting team for building on the early stage Drupal distribution we had.
The outcome was a full-fledged decoupled and AI-enabled Drupal distribution — a one of its kind anywhere in the world — which we called EzContent (amidst disagreements on on the naming of the brand).
(The rest of the Drupal bench was put into contributing to Drupal itself which raised Srijan from a humble 2nd page listing on Drupal’s Marketplace to #2 on the global listing index.)
Turning Srijan from a “We Do Drupal!” to a Drupal distribution-led sales strategy
Srijan’s entire sales strategy was around sharing with customers, demos of our large high-visibility successful deployments. While our success stories with Drupal have been no mean achievement, there was never a sales pitch that we had beyond ‘being the among the largest Drupal companies in Asia’ (and similar).
EzContent is now the go-to-market with strategy (sales pitch) to demonstrate our Drupal capability. We’re now going far-and-wide across industries sharing with customers how they could enhance their editorial, marketing and even their end-customer experience with our decoupled and AI-enabled Drupal distribution.
Over the last 4 months we’ve won two global RFPs using EzContent including one with Mediacorp, Singapore (and that too in the middle of the Covid crisis).
The final most coveted recognition : Acquia Engage Award 2020
In the Drupal business and developer world, there is no bigger award than than the annual Acquia Engage Awards. This is the most prestigious recognition of our dedicated work, our engineering excellence, our commitment to open source, and our focus of focussing on ‘doing the right things’.
Gratitude!
My deep gratitude towards the consulting and tech leadership and their team who have led Srijan to this place of success! Thank you very much!
