דרופל - לינווייט | Linnovate - drupal israel

Two years ago, we founded Linnovate.net, the first Drupal shop is Israel (a small, unknown province of the Middle-East). Linnovate chose Drupal as it's almost unique tool of work, as we've recognized that a business can be built upon this wonderful CMS.
Being one the firsts to identify Drupal in Israel, and the first to actually use it as a strategy of a company, we've grown to be the biggest, and the most knowledgeable Drupal shop in Israel.
But, being so open-source freaks, we knew that in order to have a bigger share of the market, we'd better enlarge it, and not just maintain our position in it. We then decided to create the Drupal market in Israel.

First thing we did was to set up The Israeli Drupal community (though we're not it's owners) which was very successful in getting more and more people to know about Drupal, and allowed people to ask questions. We also launched a new website in Drupal, for a students association. The inauguration of the site well celebrated with a big party, which was good for public relations. It was the first time we saw people (~200) actually standing and cheering a website :-)
The next thing we did was to establish a training program for Drupal (also see in groups.drupal.org), with the understanding that in order to expand the market, we need to have more service providers. We never feared competition, and in some way we can also say that we created it, and encouraged it. This is a truly open source business approach.

Since then, the Drupal service providers list has grown from 1 to 12, most of them from the last 6 months: some of them have worked for us, some of them still do, some have made their first steps with us, and have now opened their own businesses. They are now our potential competitors, but we are still happy to see that we have succeeded in our first mission - to create a Drupal market in a country!

(pardon my partner who kept the ad in his back pocket for the whole weekend...)

Now, this post could have been written without any special event. However, I'm happy that there is one:
On the weekend edition of the biggest newspaper in Israel, which is read by almost half of the country's population, there was a job ad, of Bar-Ilan University (one of the biggest in Israel), looking for a (not-freelance) Drupal developer. This was probably the first time Drupal is entering the prime-time bulletin (and not only in dedicates sites and forums).
If you only look at numbers, this won't impress you too much, since Israel has less habitants than NYC, but this is not obvious for us as it may be for some of you, living in Belgium or the U.S.
We made Drupal hit a much larger public, and I'm proud at doing that.