Acquia Coverage

June 29, 2012, 11:53 AM — While Red Hat remains the poster child for open source success stories, at least in the eyes of the business world, Drupal vendor Acquia has quietly been enjoying phenomenal growth and accolades of its own.

The Burlington, MA-based startup has hired over 50 new employees since the start of the year, and plans to hire at least 50 more in the third quarter alone, according to a tweet from CTO and co-founder Dries Buytaert this morning.

The Drupal content management system is one of the most popular CMS in the world today and, like competing platforms Joomla! and WordPress, is open source. Acquia is the commercial vendor of Drupal, which Buytaert co-founded in 2007.

In the ensuing four years, Acquia has picked up $38.5 million in venture cap funding and has well over 2,000 customers. Not only does Acquia provide the usual sort of support for Drupal deployments, but it also hosts websites on its Drupal Gardens service, and provides elastic Managed Cloud hosting services.

Meanwhile, the Drupal community has done spectacularly well, too. The non-profit Drupal Association, started in 2006, has become one of the largest open source communities in the world.

"We have supported the Drupal community in its exponential growth from 70,000 members to over 800,000 and from 700 committers to over 18,000. And we are just getting started," Buytaert wrote in a blog entry this week.

Acquia Completes SSAE 16 Examination

Acquia, the enterprise guide to open-source content management system Drupal, announced that it has recently completed and obtained a service auditor's review for the Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements (SSAE) 16.

SSAE 16, which replaces the previous SAS70 auditing standard, is a regulatory standard issued by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. A critical component in achieving SSAE 16 compliance is an organization's ability to reduce risk and provide clients with controlled security measures.

Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal, co-founder and CTO, Acquia.

Buytaert is the man who created one of the world's most popular content management systems, Drupal. What started as a little project he wrote in his dorm turned into software that powers a million websites including the White House, NASA and Twitter.

The promise of billion-dollar exits and splashy stock offerings have long lured tech entrepreneurs to the southern San Francisco Bay area and prompted other metropolitan areas to try to create their own innovation-based sectors.

Tech City in east London, England, is one such example and some Canadian startups looking to tap into larger markets are bypassing the original Valley and instead heading east across the Atlantic.

Hossein Rahnama, founder and chief executive of Flybits based out of Ryerson University’s Digital Media Zone (DMZ) in Toronto, said he decided to set up a second office in London because it was similar to the company’s home city in many ways.

This Sunday June 24th, Ring of Honor Wrestling presents “Best in the World 2012: Hostage Crisis” live on iPPV!! Featuring the rematch between “Wrestling’s Worst Nightmare” Kevin Steen & Davey Richards for the ROH World Title, the iPPV broadcast will be made available for purchase later this week!

In order to provide our fans with the best iPPV experience possible, we have entered into a contract with Acquia, one of the most reputable Drupal Hosting and Performance companies, to resolve web performance issues and to migrate to their scalable hosting solution. A great deal of our resources are being employed to make sure this migration goes smoothly during the week and that all issues are resolved prior to Sunday afternoon’s iPPV broadcast. To help with any issues that may occur during the course of the event, we will also have an engineer on-hand to scale hardware resources or resolve any bottlenecks on the fly. Please bear with us this week, as we may need to take down rohwrestling.com for as 12-36 hours around Wednesday/Thursday to complete the migration successfully.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- I'm at a crowded tech schmoozefest, and Tim Rowe, the pied piper of local startups, is giving me a serious talking-to about my blase attitude toward the local tech industry.

"I'd like you to think about what you're saying and look at the facts," Rowe says with growing intensity. "I think you're going to see your perception and the facts don't add up."

No startup culture? Look around here in the Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square, ground zero for New England startups, Rowe says. There are about seven floors filled with nearly 450 startups and offices for two major venture capital firms, Charles River Ventures and Highland Partners. And there's more academic research and development spending in Cambridge than any other part of the country, including the San Francisco Bay Area.
It's true. About $4 billion annually just in Cambridge versus $1.3 billion in the Bay Area, according to the National Science Foundation. And that stuff in the college labs, we all know, often leads to game-changing companies like Google.

Ci&T has provided application management services to MetLife Brazil, a life insurance company, to guarantee constant availability of mission-critical applications and allow the IT team to focus directly on business-exclusive activities.

Breno Gomes, chief technology officer at MetLife Brazil, noted that application support is a big issue for many companies, and that the greatest benefit is that Ci&T offers metrics and reports with deep analysis allowing the company to identify the source of problems and resolve them quickly.

Ci&T’s expertise in application development makes it the perfect partner to not only build applications, but to manage them as well. The company’s teams employ agile methodologies and Lean principles to deliver value-generating projects for companies of all sizes, by leveraging the latest mobile, cloud and Web technologies.

To MetLife Brazil, the company’s teams deliver application management services. They also provide ongoing support for many applications within the organization, according to company officials.

Network pain affects every IT manager.

• Network hardware like load balancers are expensive.
• Network design is complex, especially sprawling enterprise networks and multi-tenant ISP networks.
• Expertise is required to keep them running.

Any company that can ease this pain is onto a good thing. Virtualizing network technology is a hot cloud topic that companies like Embrane, Nicira and Big Switch Networks are in the middle of. The next piece of virtual networking technology for me to deal with is a load balancer. Here, I talk about load balancing in general, and later I will use the AWS console to add a virtual load balancer to my new pair of Drupal instances.

Today everything has an API. Facebook has hundreds of APIs across such social areas as friends, photos, likes and events. Google has thousands of APIs across search/AdWords, Web analytics, YouTube, maps, email and many more. Amazon has APIs that cover the spectrum from Alexa Web traffic rankings to e-commerce product and pricing information and even the ability to start and stop individual machines. I spent a decade architecting and building component and services based software, and another decade after that evaluating and investing in infrastructure software, I believe this mobile and cloud influenced wave of RESTful service-oriented software may finally live up to its initial promise.

Although the majority of API attention has centered on consumer Web services, an emerging cadre of startups are focused on infrastructure and business processes. These newcomers are providing a broad range of critical services neatly packaged as frameworks or APIs. Some of these companies, such as Salesforce and Google Maps, are next generation SaaS providers that have built solutions to serve both end users and developers. Others, including Mailchimp and Twilio, are pure play offerings that solely target developers as customers.