What does Krimson do and how did you first get involved with Drupal?

Krimson is Belgium's first fully dedicated Drupal company. I used Drupal for the school site of my eldest sun, and from then on I was totally hooked. I visited the Drupalcon in Brussels, which had the same size as the latest DrupalCamp in Cologne, and there I volunteered to start up a Belgian Drupal Community. That community has just finished our own Drupal Redesign Sprint to revamp http://drupal.be. Things grow fast with Drupal :)The first discussions about a dedicated Drupal shop started at the OpenSource CMS Conference at Yahoo's campus in Sunnyvale. At the same moment Dries was talking with Jay about creating Acquia, I was talking with Jo Wouters about creating Krimson. Similar discussions but a major difference in size.

Can you tell us a bit about a Drupal website you built lately that's particularly interesting?

As Drupal architects we are working for a big environmental organization in Belgium. They maintain about 20 websites for a lot of their environmental campaigns, and are struggling with maintenance (all different versions of a custom CMS, training, re-use of functionality). We've just launched three new websites. (see http://is.gd/k0kh). We are now in the process of taking this approach one step further and develop a strategy and infrastructure to allow them to become self-sustainable by next year. During the process we will help them to get about 7 or 8 websites on line in the coming months. We believe that this is something a lot of NGO's could use. There has been some interest from other social organizations and from political parties in this approach.
Instead of fixing their problems, we provide them with the tools (Drupal, Strategy and Training) so that they are able to solve their own problems in the future.

We are also very proud about the http://nrcboeken.nl website. This was a interesting project in the newspaper business, creating a big site (over 140,000 nodes all interconnected with each other) with back-end integration, webservices etc, daily and weekly data import from different sources, and using Drupal as the glue between all that information.

How else are you involved in the Drupal community?

Most of our active involvement is in the promotion of Drupal. Krimson is a whole team of Open Source lovers. We provide our team with the backup to allow them to post patches on D.O, attend Drupal Meetups, and organize Local Drupal Events. Jo Wouters is now recovering from the co-organization of the Drupal Track at http://fosdem.org, and I'm recovering from the http://drupal.be redesign sprint on Valentines day. We're all regular (invited) speakers at local DUG's, DrupalCamps and DrupalJams in Belgium, Netherlands, France and Germany. I will also be involved in organizing the Training-track at the next DrupalCon in Paris.

What are most looking forward to at DrupalCon DC?

Both my associate and I have been working for over 10 years in high-quality environments like banking, insurance, automotive and industry. Based on our knowledge of this corporate world, we do believe that Open source software -and Drupal is no exception- needs some extra professionalism before the 'BIG' fishes will use them in business critical situations. I hope to meet other people who are struggling with this and who have found a way to deal with issues like moving content/development from a test server to a live server or being able to maintain security upgrades for all those website we're hosting.

But most of all, I'm looking forward to meeting my Drupal friends.