Leadership
Dries Buytaert Chief Technology Officer
Dries Buytaert is the original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform. Buytaert serves as president of the Drupal Association, a non-profit organization formed to help Drupal flourish. He is also co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, a venture-backed software company that offers products and services for Drupal. Dries is also a co-founder of Mollom, a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop website spam. A native of Belgium, Buytaert holds a PhD in computer science and engineering from Ghent University and a Licentiate Computer Science (MsC) from the University of Antwerp. In 2008, Buytaert was elected Young Entrepreneurs of Tech by BusinessWeek as well as MIT TR 35 Young Innovator.
Thomas Erickson Chief Executive Officer
Tom started his career in open source in 1980 (really). Except that it was called public domain software, derivatives were completely legal and hosting in the cloud was provided in Seattle by Boeing. Joining Acquia in 2008 was a return to those values and concepts after almost 30 years of living in the USA, Europe and Australia as an executive in proprietary software companies.
Prior to Acquia, Tom was Chief Products Officer at map maker Tele Atlas. Before that, he was CEO of Systinet, a leading provider of SOA tools that was acquired by Mercury Interactive and subsequently Hewlett Packard. During the rise of the internet, Tom was the EVP International for webMethods, based in Sydney, Australia. He's also served in executive roles at the Baan Company and Watermark Software in addition to his early days at MRO Software, known as Project Software and Development, Inc. in 1980.
Tom is passionate about many things. His diversions include wine, food, photography, skiing, golf and traveling to Australia and beyond. His roots are in Wisconsin, and received a BS Honors in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the UW-Madison. He's been an advisor and board director for several private companies.
Mary Jefts Chief Financial Officer
Mary joined Acquia in 2011 as Chief Financial Officer with responsibility for finance, legal, human resources and information technology. Mary has over 20 years of leadership experience with both public and private companies. Mary joined Acquia from IBM where she served as a Business Unit Executive in the Business Analytics Division with global responsibility for sales, marketing, services and development. Prior to IBM, Mary was the Chief Financial Officer for OpenPages, a leading provider of Governance, Risk and Compliance solutions, which was acquired by IBM. Before joining OpenPages, Mary was Vice President of Finance at Netegrity, Inc., a publicly-traded software company that was acquired by CA in 2004. Mary began her career as an auditor with PwC and is a Certified Public Accountant in Massachusetts. Mary earned her BS in Accounting from Bentley University.
Ronald C. Pruett, Jr. Chief Marketing Officer
Chris Brookins VP, Engineering and Product Management
Chris joined Acquia from Vertical Communications, where he managed engineering for several IP PBX and call center products, and lead a large adoption of Scrum. Prior to Vertical, Chris managed engineering at Stylus Innovation, a telephony toolkit startup that was sold to Artisoft. At work, he is passionate about user and developer experiences and facilitating high performance teams. He is the proud father of 2 boys and a very amateur photographer, cook, and tennis player. Chris earned his BS in computer science from Lehigh University.
Mike Stankus VP, Corporate Sales
Mike is a 25 year veteran of the information technology industry, holding executive leadership positions at CompuServe and Sapient. Mike has also founded three companies including S&H Loyalty Solutions which was sold to Pay by Touch in 2006 for in excess of $100 million.
Warren Utt VP, Sales Operations & Worldwide Channels
Warren has over 20 years of experience with software and services companies. Most recently, Warren served as CEO of Impress Software in Waltham, Massachusetts. Impress Software was a leading supplier of packaged integration software for the Enterprise Resource Planning market. Prior to Impress, Warren was Senior Vice President of World Wide Field Operations for BroadVision. Warren is the proud father of 2 boys and enjoys coaching basketball as well as playing tennis. Warren earned his BA from Hamden-Sydney College.
Peter Guagenti VP, Services
Peter Guagenti is the VP of Services at Acquia, where he is responsible for the consulting, support, and training teams, as well as for the Acquia Network. Peter brings an unrelenting focus on delivering results for Acquia's customers and partners.
Peter joined Acquia with over 15 years of experience in strategy and client services; helping the world’s best companies innovate and succeed in the digital world while working at organizations as diverse as Razorfish and Accenture. He was practically “born digital”, and has been helping Fortune 500 clients embrace the web since the early days of the browser in 1995. Since that time, Peter has helped some of the world’s most recognized brands use the digital channel to grow existing or develop new businesses, reach customers with innovative and efficient marketing campaigns, and create the kind of sites and infrastructure that ensure painless expansion and growth as the web increases in importance to their business.
Tim Bertrand VP, Worldwide Field Sales
Tim came to Acquia from OpenSpan where he served as Vice President of Worldwide Channels, which included managing many Enterprise deals and all worldwide ISV/OEM, Reseller, System Integrator and Public Sector relationships. Prior to joining OpenSpan, Tim served in various leadership roles including direct, indirect and Public Sector sales roles at Systinet Corporation (acquired by Mercury Interactive), Cape Clear Software (acquired by Workday) and Silverstream Software (acquired by Novell).
At Acquia, Tim oversees the field sales team that manages many of the company's Enterprise customer relationships, as well as the Worldwide Public Sector, Europe, APAC and other strategic initiatives.
Tim graduated from Bryant University and currently resides in Sturbridge, MA with his wife, daughter and two boxer dogs. Outside of Acquia, Tim and his wife own a semi-professional auto racing team & enjoy traveling, cooking and great wine.
Bryan House VP, Product Marketing
Bryan joined Acquia in 2008 to run product marketing. He came to Acquia from EMC, where he managed product and outbound marketing for Documentum’s knowledge worker business. Prior to EMC, Bryan worked in product marketing and product management in the social business and collaboration technology space, after brewing beer professionally for seven years. Bryan lives in the Boston area and is an ardent Red Sox fan, he earned his MBA at Harvard.
Deborah E. Gray Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary
Deborah joins Acquia as its first Vice President and General Counsel. Previously, Deborah was Vice President and General Counsel of Sapient Corporation, where she was the first General Counsel. Deborah helped steer Sapient, a business and technology consultant company, through tremendous growth including its initial public offering, several follow-on offerings and numerous acquisitions. Deborah has also held senior legal positions at Charles River Laboratories and Harcourt General. She began her legal career at Hale and Dorr (now WilmerHale) in Boston where she was a Junior Partner in the Corporate Department before leaving the firm to begin her in-house practice. Deborah is an alumna of Boston College Law School and Colby College. She is a former member of the Board of Directors of The Home for Little Wanderers, a former Overseer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and is a Trustee Emeritus of Colby College.
Michael Meyers VP, Large Scale Drupal
Michael E. Meyers is an Emmy-nominated technologist and entrepreneur with over 17 years of experience managing and leading local and globally distributed teams. His most recent startup, RHO Ventures-backed NowPublic.com, pioneered citizen journalism, user-generated content, and crowdsourcing. As CTO of The Clarity Digital Group, which acquired NowPublic in 2009, Michael led Examiner.com’s migration to open source technology, launching the first Drupal-based top-100 Internet property. Previously as a founding member of domain name marketplace Afternic.com, Michael led development efforts from the company’s launch through its acquisition and integration into Register.com in 2000. During his tenure at Register.com, a top 100 site, Michael led web development across all business units and subsidiaries for the second-largest domain name registrar in the world. A passionate open source advocate and advisor to the Drupal Association board, Michael is a regular speaker at industry events.
