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Bar far the most common reason we hear for businesses investigating Drupal involves problems with legacy proprietary CMS. For years now, businesses have understood the value of content management systems, and most corporate websites were build with scalability and dynamic content in mind. However, very few were concerned with open source or understood the fragility of in-house solutions at the time - and now, with CMS technology largely driven by major community projects such as Drupal, these companies are finding their legacy systems have fallen far behind the curve, with no one willing or able to spend the time updating them to meet current standards.

Drupal is naturally positioned to ease the lingering pain of these legacy systems; many of them have been maintained far beyond their usefulness, simply because they offered a level of customization that was difficult to find in the open market - a claim which is rapidly losing ground as modules have been written in Drupal to address virtually any issue.

And it's not just the small and medium business moving away from proprietary systems. More and more large-scale companies are embracing the customization options and flexibility the Drupal CMS brings to the table: from the Onion to the Economist, Ozzy Osborne to Avril Lavigne, Greenpeace to Harvard University, major companies and organizations everywhere are moving to Drupal for a dynamic and scalable solution with better support options, a better knowledge base, and a stronger development pool than could ever be afforded by a proprietary system.

What makes this trend even more exciting is that small and medium business now have the opportunity to take advantage of the same web technologies that drive Fortune 500 companies - without the same prohibitive costs that tend to run rampant when working with proprietary CMS. Many of the SMBs we deal with every day have found in Drupal a way to finally close the gap between themselves and the industry "big dogs" with in-house developers and exorbitant budgets. Now any company can team with a good Drupal shop to produce a dynamic, well-supported, and secure website that won't require excessive IT support to administer - leveling the playing field and providing their customers with valuable content. Needless to say, we're pretty happy to be a part of this trend.