Owen Lansbury

Drupal contribution is often considered a direct cost by agency leaders, but PreviousNext has proven that contribution is a key investment in business sustainability and profitability. 

For PreviousNext, the decisions to make contribution part of how we work and to become a Drupal Certified Partner (DCP) have paid off many times over, both in terms of business growth and team development. 

With Drupal now heavily used in the enterprise market by very large organisations, much of its direct competition is from well-funded proprietary products. From the perspective of my role on the Drupal Association board, I gave a talk at FOSDEM in February 2024 on the strategies and initiatives the Drupal community is starting to put in place to remain competitive in the enterprise market and how these approaches can be shared by other open source projects. 

Contributing makes good business sense, especially when open-source technology, such as Drupal, is at the core of everything you do (pun intended!). 

As we enter our 14th year of operations in 2022, PreviousNext is taking a bold step into employee ownership, utilising a groundbreaking approach that’s only recently become possible in Australia.

Take a peek inside to see what it's like to work at PreviousNext! We're opening up our handbook so you can see how we work together and the benefits we all enjoy.

Like many companies, PreviousNext didn't expect the Coronavirus crisis to hit so hard or quick, nor did we anticipate the rapid effects on the global economy. However, we have always run our company based on sustainable principles, so feel well prepared to deal with what's coming over the next few months. We hope sharing our approach might help others weather the coming storm too!

PreviousNext builds open source digital platforms for large scale customers, primarily based on Drupal and hosted using Kubernetes, two of the world’s biggest open source projects. With our business reliant on the success of these open source projects, our company is committed to contributing where we can in relation to our relatively small size. We get a lot of questions about how we do this, so are happy to share our policies so that other organisations might adopt similar approaches.

Since co-founding PreviousNext in 2009 with Kim Pepper, our company has put a lot of focus into supporting the Drupal open source project and community at a regional and global level.