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Thomas Erickson

Chief Executive Officer
Acquia, Inc.

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. Since then, Tom has led Acquia to numerous distinctions, including #1 Software Vendor on the 2012 Inc. 500 (#8 overall), MassTLC's 2012 Private Company of the Year and Forbes' 100 List of America's Most Promising 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.

Recent blog posts

Posted on Friday, March 9, 2012 - 09:23
まず、このポストを翻訳してくれた杉本守弘氏に謝辞を述べたいと思います。 アクィア (Acquia) の CEO として、私が ドゥルパル (Drupal) に対して情熱を抱いていることは皆様にお分かりいただけることと思います。しかしあまりご存知でないと思われるのは、私が日本 - その人々、土地、そして市場機会 - に対しても情熱的であるということです。今まで個人的に40回以上日本を訪問しており、最盛期は1999年以降のことです。最初の訪日は1993年でしたが、 More...
Posted on Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - 23:48
Drupal Gardens passed a significant milestone yesterday, 40,000 sites created!    This is an especially exciting moment for me as Acquia gets ready to exit the Drupal Gardens beta program tomorrow. Reaching 40,000 blew away my expectations for the More...
Posted on Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - 22:59
Drupal Gardens passed a significant milestone yesterday, 40,000 sites created! This is an especially exciting moment for me as Acquia gets ready to exit the Drupal Gardens beta program tomorrow. Reaching 40,000 blew away my expectations for the More...
Posted on Friday, February 4, 2011 - 11:41
This blog post is cross-posted from the 2011 Future of Open Source Forum website. As I have for the past few years, I’ll be attending the Open Source Business Conference this May in San Francisco. What makes this year different is that I will More...
Posted on Friday, January 21, 2011 - 10:07
I was recently asked to speak to a group of CTOs in Europe and the USA about social business tools. Designed as an information session, the organizers asked Acquia to present how an open source platform like Drupal could be used to build effective More...
Posted on Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - 07:12
Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, commented in an interview with France's leading newspaper Le Monde, that "it will be practically impossible to create today a proprietary alternative to Drupal". The remarks were in the context of the evolution More...
Posted on Monday, November 8, 2010 - 10:46
When I joined Acquia 18 months ago, one of our top priorities was communicating our partner strategy. As a priority, it’s still right up there, an indication that, while we have made progress, we need to be more transparent, more communicative More...
Posted on Tuesday, November 2, 2010 - 16:52
The social web is dramatically changing the way we work and play. Organizations are gaining substantial productivity improvements from what the inventor of the term web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly, describes as “harnessing the collective intelligence.” But More...
Posted on Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - 13:59
Ever since Dries co-founded Acquia, having a commercial presence in Europe has been an oft discussed topic inside the company. We do have European customers today, and we have Europe based team members in our technical teams, but we have not had More...
Posted on Monday, August 16, 2010 - 11:09
McKinsey’s latest quarterly includes an updated list of top technology trends to watch. The list was first published over two years ago and described eight tech-business trends that were reshaping strategy across industries. Since then, the social More...

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