Picture this: It's 2010. You're running a Drupal 7 shop in Latin America, building sites for local retailers, tourism operators, small hotels, regional banks. Your clients pay regional rates, you deliver professional results, everyone wins. Fast forward to 2015. That hotel wants to upgrade to Drupal 8. You quote them honestly based on the work required. They go to WordPress. Then the retailer. Then the tourism operator. By 2018, you're chasing nearshore contracts with US companies because serving your own market became economically impossible.
Here's what changed: Drupal got complex AND expensive. Our rates went up to match the work required. US nearshore contracts paid those rates, so we pivoted. For a while, it worked. But today's economic reality means those nearshore opportunities aren't as abundant as they were. Meanwhile, our regional market is still there, still needs websites, still dominated by platforms we used to compete with.
Drupal CMS flips this story. Recipes collapse deployment time. Project Browser removes the complexity barrier. Automatic updates solve the upgrade cost nightmare. Site templates and Canvas give clients the visual starting points they need. Designed themes from initiatives like Dripyard mean professional results without custom front-end builds. This isn't just features, it's economic transformation that makes serving LATAM markets viable again.
This session maps the path back to sustainable regional business. We'll explore real strategies for building with Drupal CMS in LATAM markets. Whether you built your business in the Drupal 7 era and want to reclaim that market, or you're new to the community looking for sustainable models, this is about making Drupal work for Latin America again. The tools are ready. The market never left. Time to get back on trail.