I recently spoke with Drupal founder and Acquia CTO and cofounder Dries Buytaert. Dries gave me an update on Acquia's success to date and plans for the future. Many readers know Acquia as one of the key vendors behind the White House's recent move to open source.
Acquia has achieved significant traction in its two years of existence. Dries points out that the company spent a year establishing a sustainable business model and strategy, as well as working within the Drupal community. According to Dries, Acquia only began revenue-generating efforts a year ago.
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Acquia currently counts more than 300 customers -- not bad after a year. As expected, Acquia's customer base is currently weighted toward the SMB market, making up 50 percent of the total. However, large enterprises adopting Drupal and Acquia Drupal are the fastest-growing segment, currently representing 30 percent of Acquia's customers. The remaining 20 percent of customers are public sector, higher education, and not-for-profit organizations.
What's Acquia's goal? Dries suggests: "To become to Drupal what Red Hat is to Linux." To achieve this goal, Acquia is executing against a three-pronged strategy. First, Acquia sells support subscriptions to Acquia's Drupal distribution, which can be customized to customer needs or to any collection of Drupal core and Drupal extensions. Second, Acquia recently announced Acquia Hosting. This offering was in response to customer requests to host and manage their Drupal implementation. Acquia Hosting is built on Amazon's EC2. Finally, Acquia is working on Drupal Gardens. Set for release in the first half of 2010, Drupal Gardens will be a hosted offering much like Wordpress.com. Drupal Gardens aims to reduce the time between "design to online in hours," as Dries puts it. Check out the cool demo.
Acquia definitely has an aggressive road map ahead. I look forward to catching up with Dries and team to hear about progress in 2010.
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This story, "What's new with Acquia?," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com.