Drupal And WordPress Hosting Service Pantheon Launches New Enterprise Product

Pantheon, a well-funded website hosting and management platform for Drupal and WordPress sites, today announced that it is launching a new enterprise service.

Pantheon Enterprise builds on the company’s experience in building and running its service for agencies that handle the sites of multiple clients. That service now hosts the sites of more than 1,500 of Pantheon’s agency partners.

The enterprise version adds a number of tools on top of Pantheon’s standard offerings that should make the service more attractive to large businesses. These include SAML integration for standard single-sign-on solutions like Active Directory. The Enterprise package also includes a dashboard to manage all of a company’s websites (and add new ones), role-based change management and the ability to create an unlimited number of cloud environments for developing new sites. The service will also be backed by an SLA.

As Pantheon co-founder (and head of developer experience) Josh Koenig told me, the service will cost $10,000 per year, which includes unlimited developer seats and an unlimited number of sandboxed projects. Enterprises will also get a credit of about $850 for production hosting, which he notes should be enough to host a couple of smaller sites. The idea here is to help enterprises get a few projects going and then as they launch more sites, they will pay Pantheon’s standard fees for running those on its platform.

Koenig argues that Pantheon allows its corporate clients to work more efficiently because his company handles the platform. “When you think about these teams, they are all talent and time constrained,” he said. “If we can give these people a 10 percent or 20 percent efficiency gain — and also make them less likely to make mistakes — that’s a really compelling value proposition.”

As Koening also said, about 50 percent of Pantheon’s revenue currently comes from elite-level sites with SLAs and annual contracts. “Now we need to get this product buttoned up, start selling it, and our believe is that as we get this out there and in more peoples’ hands, it’ll drive revenue up in Q2 and Q3 next year,” he said and added that it obviously take a while for people to adopt this service and the start spinning up sites on it.