As you may have noticed, I recently honed the 'mission statement' for Cronen-Townsend Consulting from "Building custom Web architecture with Drupal" to "Building custom Web platforms based on Drupal". Here is the story behind the change.

Recently, I listened to the Acquia webinar Amazon Web Services Building Blocks for Drupal Applications and Hosting. The first part of the presentation was by Jeff Barr, Senior Web Services Evangelist at Amazon, who explained Amazon Web Services. In his presentation he used the terms IaaS and PaaS, for "Infrastructure as a Service" and "Platform as a Service." respectively. The talk was followed by an explanation by my friend Barry Jaspan of Acquia's Drupal hosting environment, which is built on Amazon Web Services.

The term inrfrastructure was used for rather low level services, and it occurred to me that Acquia's hosting environment, may be described as architecture building on the IaaS Amazon provides. On the other hand, higher level structure was called "platforms" and "applications".

So I decided to upgrade Cronen-Townsend Consulting's mission statement to use the term "platforms" instead of "architecture". When I build a single web site based on Drupal, what I am really delivering is a customized platform which is a good foundation for future growth. This hits the real strength of Drupal-based solutions. And the word "platforms" also hints at the way that I can deliver, using Drupal's installation profiles, a package that can be used to install a single website each time it is executed. And the nearly limitless possibilities provided by things like multiple web sites running on the same Drupal PHP code and sharing a common database, and on and on...