Upheavals in the energy sector in recent years are driving a new Texas-sized need for efficiencies in all facets of business operations and are leading companies to begin mining new areas for streamlining and savings.

Houston, we have a solution.

The good news is open source technologies are opening up areas for exploration previously overlooked by many in the energy sector. In this multi-part series we’ll begin to look at how energy companies use the web and how open source internet technologies can drastically reduce acquisition costs, enable rapid prototyping, and create a potential for windfall profits.

Here’s a preview of our upcoming series on Drupal for the Energy Sector. Use the form below to sign up for our newsletter to get notified when we post new articles or sign up for our free training session on September 16 in Houston.

Acquisition Cost

Ever test drive a Lamborghini? Me neither. How about a proprietary web experience platform by one of the venders in Gartner’s Quadrants? Not happening. You wouldn’t buy a car you couldn’t test drive. Why consider purchasing a software platform you couldn’t pilot? Unless it’s open source you’re going to have to pay dearly for the privilege of any kind of test drive. Among the platforms listed in Gartner’s magic platform, Drupal is the only system you can freely pilot around your business needs.

Rapid Prototyping

Just because its free doesn’t mean you know what to do with it. Many open source systems have a huge transparent install base. You can install a simple plugin in your web browser that will tell you what Content Management System, technology or platform is being used. Drupal takes it even further with free custom developed distributions for different functional needs like ERP, localization and translation, publishing, ecommerce, event organizing, and networking. Agencies can build in various front end technologies and connect them to a Drupal backend with minimal customization.

Windfall Profits

How large is your IT department? Chances are the answer is something like, ‘Not big enough to do the job we have ahead of us.’ The nature of an open source project means you can tap more personnel than you could ever achieve a return on with a proprietary system. Drupal alone has over 3,000 developers that contributed to their latest version, Drupal 8. All of them are writing code that is highly secure and available for you to try and use for free.

Stay tuned for more on each of these and other topics in the coming days.