Last year, Gartner classified Drupal as a 'niche player', meaning Drupal does well in a segment of a market, but that we had limited ability to innovate or outperform competitors. In this year's report, which was released last week, Drupal was promoted to the 'visionaries' category right next to Google and other big players. According to Gartner, visionaries align with Gartner's view of how a market will evolve, but they have yet to deliver against that vision.

Here is what Nikos Drakos, Research Director at Gartner wrote about Drupal's pomotion: "Drupal is in the Visionaries quadrant because of its use of the open source model to drive adoption and popularity, while providing enterprise services via organizations such as Acquia. Its strong content-centric, community and web application foundation is being rapidly extended with hundreds of modules, including many for collaboration and social interaction support."

Why does this matter? As most of you know, there are hundreds of web content management systems and not everyone has the time or skill sets to figure out what system to use. Plus, large organizations that are about to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a website project, don't want to make the wrong technology choice. Instead, those large businesses call Gartner, or any of the other analyst firms, to get advice on what technologies to adopt.

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