Acquia Coverage

When it comes to choosing a content management system (CMS), the open-source Drupal is often a great choice for large or content-rich sites, because it scales well, supports multiple authors and is thoroughly customizable. The downside of all of this power is that for new users especially, the learning curve can be pretty steep. Although Drupal 6 was a huge step forward in overall usability, from a web admin perspective, it's still not exactly easy.

Acquia, a company founded by Drupal creator and project lead Dries Buytaert, has just launched Acquia Drupal, which packages Drupal and some of the most popular and highly rated community modules together and also offers commercial support. This is a big win for both Drupal and current and future Drupal users.

Acquia Drupal is a free GPL-licensed download. It contains the Drupal 6.x core (currently at 6.4), a bunch of community contributed modules, like Google Analytics, Mollom (Dries's spam-fighting content solution), and rating and image gallery tools. I installed Acquia Drupal on my local test server and also installed the latest Drupal release, 6.4. The install process was already easier with Acquia Drupal, because I didn't have to create a settings.php file in advance before filling in my database details.

Acquia has announced the availability of Acquia Drupal, a free and commercially supported distribution of the popular Drupal open source social publishing system. They also unveiled the Acquia Network, which offers subscription-based access to technical support and remote network services that simplify the development and operation of Drupal Web sites. Entry level subscriptions to the Acquia Network will be free of charge through the end of the year.

For those that aren’t overly familiar with Drupal, it’s an open source web development and content management platform that publishes, manages and organizes a wide variety of content on websites. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal.

With the release of Acquia Drupal with its streamlined packaging of Drupal and a support system via the Acquia Network, there will definitely be a tremendous increase in Drupal developers and websites powered by this Drupal.

We've reported before on Acquia's effort to deliver a commercially supported version of the popular Drupal content management system (CMS). As of Tuesday morning, Acquia Drupal--the commercially supported version--and Acquia Network--which offers subscription-based access to technical support and remote network services--are going live. Acquia has also announced that entry-level subscriptions to the Acquia Network will be free of charge through the end of the year, so that people can try the services. Here are details, and some comments we got from Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia.

Acquia Drupal is a packaged collection of the many social publishing and content creation tools and modules found in Drupal itself. It will be free to download as of Tuesday morning, and offered under the GNU public license. Acquia's business model is similar to Red Hat's and other companies that offer open source software for free, and get revenues from support and services. As we've reported before, OStatic is based on Drupal, as are many sites such as Fast Company and The Onion.

With the Open Source Conference (OSCon) and IDG's LinuxWorld show in the rearview mirror of 2008, it is clear that open source is no longer just a trendy conversation.

What has happened is a clear evolution of a community that has grown up and produced intelligent, cutting-edge technologies with an eye on making computing faster, smarter and cheaper for corporate users. Companies like Openmoko are challenging the mobile device market with its notion that users should control what applications are installed. Others like XAware and SnapLogic are opening up data integration possibilities, and still more are tangling with virtualization, databases, and trading systems. Along with a company accurately called Untangle, the companies' point is to make computing less complex.

The decision is no longer a question of open source, but about what product is best at solving computing problems regardless of how it was built.

Here is a look at 10 companies to watch.

Acquia has finally taken the wraps off its commercially supported Drupal distribution, and it looks like the wait was worth it. Drupal was already a great web content management publishing system, but Acquia's spin on it should make it even better:

The release is essentially a hardened distribution of Drupal, complemented with technical support and network service offerings. Code named Carbon for now, the package includes a select set of community contributed modules alongside the Drupal core. Acquia has taken the task of pre-testing, reviewing, and comparing all community contributed modules to offer a set of the most relevant and reliable contributions. Site administrators are notified of updates to Carbon modules through the network, code named Spokes. The system differentiates between feature, bug fix, and security updates, and informs users of compatibility issues or other dependencies amongst different modules.

I really like the idea behind Spokes. Drupal has a fantastic community, but some of the code it produces is not up to enterprise quality. Enter Acquia to make it clear what is worth using, and what is not. Complexity breeds opportunity.

The folks from Acquia were in San Francisco for the LinuxWorld conference this week. Acquia, as we've covered before, has been working away on an array of support offerings and services for the powerful open source Drupal content management system (CMS). OStatic is based on Drupal, as are sites such as Fast Company and The Onion. Acquia's goal is to apply a Red Hat-like approach to support and services for Drupal, and it will deliver these offerings later this year. I caught up with Barry Jaspan, security lead and principal engineer at Acquia, to find out what's cooking.

Acquia shored up $7 million in funding last December, and Acquia's co-founder Dries Buytaert also founded Drupal. (Disclosure: Acquia is a sponsor of OStatic.) Given the ubiquity and complexity of Drupal, along with the dearth of support for it, the small company may have a good strategy. When I spoke with Barry Jaspan, he was quick to conjure up comparisons between Acquia and Red Hat's business model.

Loopfuse and Acquia have announced the availability of the Loopfuse Integration module for Drupal. The module links Drupal installations to the commercial Loopfuse OneView automated marketing product. The module, funded by Acquia and Loopfuse, was developed to connect the Acquia website to OneView, and has been donated to the Drupal community and is available to download at Drupal.org.

Loopfuse OneView is aimed at small to medium-size organizations, offering an ‘all-in-one’ online marketing and sales solution. Oneview is a ‘full-featured marketing automation suite’, incorporating marketing campaign implementation and tracking, generating and tracking leads from a Website, full analytics support, and CRM integration with ‘most major vendors’.

We think this is a pretty good example of the Drupal project benefitting from Acquia’s forays into the commercial realm.

While blogging platforms like WordPress and Movable Type have considerable name recognition among Web users, few outside the development community know about this flexible and open-source content management system Drupal, which powers sites like Sony BMG's Myplay, PopSci.com, and the Web 2.0 blog Center Networks.

Drupal's avid developer community voted the product into a Webware 100 award earlier this year, so when Drupal creator Dries Buytaert came to town this week I took the opportunity to catch up with him and learn a little about the upcoming commercialization project for Drupal called Acquia.

Acquia, of course, is not the first company to take an open-source product and try to commercialize it; the most popular company in this game is Red Hat, which commercializes Linux.

Acquia presented at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week, and Jeff Whatcott, who manned the Acquia stand, writes in a blog entry that most of the corporate types swinging past his booth had no idea what Drupal was.

Acquia’s mission, or course, is about changing all that, and making the open source Social Publishing (… as they insist on calling it…) platform a viable Enterprise content management/community product. If you remember, the company told us at Drupalcon Boston in March how they intend to achieve that. The first step consists of professional wrapping of the Drupal product, and will come in the shape of the subscription-based ‘Carbon’ product. Carbon consists of Drupal 6.x core and about 30 modules, some of which have been developed by the Drupal community and then vetted and tested by Acquia, with a sprinkling of modules developed by the company itself. The result is calculated to be analogous to a Red Hat enterprise subscription; a cast-iron, bug-free and supported version of a community-built product.

The second major product announcement in March was ‘Spokes’, and is a network service. Spokes will offer subscribers automatic updates, security updates and patches, personalized alerts and other remote services.

We were wondering how things were progressing along these lines, so we talked with Director of Marketing Bryan House, and got a progress report and picked up some details on upcoming products. The good new is that things are on schedule for the announced Fall launch of the company’s first products. The (ever-growing) Acquia team is beavering away on building the eCommerce store, on Network Services and on testing and packaging for the Carbon product. We talked about some cool new ideas for Acquia’s network services, and about a whole new departure for Acquia: Drupal certification and training.