The popular open source content management system Drupal is going commercial, reports InternetNews. A new company called Acquia, which is led by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, plans to offer a commercial version of the content management system based on the free version but with a host of additional modules.
Drupal may well be the unsung success story of the open source movement. The content management platform has been downloaded over 2 million times, as often as mySQL and more than Redhat. So says Jeff Whatcott, the voice of Acquia, the company created to put a commercial wrapper around Drupal in order to extend the content management system’s reach into enterprise accounts.
At Drupalcon this morning, Acquia laid out its plans for a commercially-supported Drupal.
Acquia Inc. has launched a suite of products based on the Drupal open-source social publishing system, officials said.
Acquia, founded in June 2007, employs 12 workers. The company develops products based on Drupal, an open-source platform for Internet applications such as blogs, wikis, community networks, digital-media portals, and core web content management. The technology is most popular with media and publishing companies, said Jeff Whatcott, vice president of marketing for Acquia.
Last December, I mentioned my excitement about Drupal's project lead, Dries Buytaert, along with Jay Batson starting a company called Acquia. While it was known that the $7 million startup would focus on Drupal for the enterprise, what was not known was the products and services that would be offered by the company. In a press release today, Acquia finally unveiled its roadmap to commercially support Drupal.
Acquia, a North Andover, Mass.-based startup, is announcing a supported product using Drupal, the open-source programming language that underlies many of the community aspects on the web, from sites such as Fast Company to The Onion. It’s a rite of passage for an open-source project to get its very own shepherd that provides a measure of support beyond the forums and masses of independent programmers who churn out the code. For Drupal, the move is akin to Red Hat offering support for Linux and Sun taking MySQL under its wing for $1 billion.
The open source Drupal content management system is going commercial thanks to a new company, called Acquia, that's led by Dries Buytaert, the founder of the Drupal project. The new effort is aiming to bring a commercially supported version of Drupal to business users and could well end up shaking up the entire content management marketplace.
What do you do with 2,000,000 downloads and a 100% growth rate? With 240,000 members of your community and 900-plus developers (a number that doubled in 2007)?
You'd start Acquia, that's what you'd do. Or, at least, that's what North Bridge Venture Partners did, and the company looks to have a huge opportunity before it. I spent some time with Jeff Whatcott, vice president of Marketing at Acquia, to get more detail on the company and its launch of its products.
When we were searching around for a new content system to power the next version of our main website, we were amazed at the selection of open source offerings that has brought the kinds of slick capabilities traditionally associated with the Interwovens and Vignettes of the world down to bite-sized packages that SMBs like us could get our arms around
A startup company will release the first commercially supported distribution of Drupal, an increasingly popular open-source Web site builder/content management system, in the second half of this year.
Acquia, cofounded by Dries Buytaert, Drupal creator and project leader, will initially release a distribution code-named "Carbon," consisting of the Drupal 6.x core, the top 30 Drupal modules among the roughly 1,800 now in existence; a packaged installer; and assorted documentation and site-building guidelines.
In the year 2000, Dries Buytaert created Drupal, a freely licensed and open source tool to manage websites, as a bulletin board for his college dorm. Since Dries released the software and a community of thousands of volunteer developers have added and improved modules, Drupal has grown immensely popular. Drupal won the overall Open CMS Award in 2007, and some speakers in Drupal's spacious developer's room at FOSDEM 2008 were dreaming aloud of its world domination.
Belgian developer Dries Buytaert is on the verge of putting open source CMS (content management system) Drupal officially into business.
Annoucing $7 million in first round founding from North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Buytaert and Jay Batson, former CEO and founder of Pingtel, hope to steer their Drupal spun startup Acquia deeper into the enterprise.
A little while back, the creator of the Drupal open source web collaboration and publishing platform, Dries Buytaert, announced that he was setting up a company alongside the project. Now that company has just got a lot of dosh
I want to congratulate Dries Buytaert and his team over at Acquia on the news that they have gained funding for their Drupal focused startup. According to their website, “Acquia is a new software company that will provide value-added software products and services for the Drupal web collaboration and publishing platform.”
Apparently, the days when a computer science graduate student can invent some cool Web software and raise a few million dollars to build a company around it are not over. Brand new (less than a month old) North Andover, MA, startup Acquia announced yesterday that it’s raised $7 million to market software and services in support of the popular Web publishing system Drupal, invented by Dries Buytaert, a PhD candidate at the University of Ghent in Belgium.
Today, Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, announced Acquia, a new Drupal startup. As is his nature, Dries articulated a compelling description of his vision of the future and how Drupal must adapt to stay relevant.
Dries spoke to the need to reach out to more and different types of people. He wants Drupal to become the Linux of the web. He addressed the social networking wave and stated the need to position Drupal as a data repository rather than merely a website development tool. Smart. Good thinking. It's coming. And, he addressed the need for financial backing for viable open source projects.
This is old news for those in the Drupal and content management communities, but for some reason has not got a lot of attention from the wider open source industry: a few days ago Dries Buytaert announced that he is forming his own Drupal start-up, called Acquia.
Buytaert has teamed up with Jay Batson, who founded Pingtel and continues to advise the company following its acquisition by Bluesocket, to form Acquia, which will offer annual subscriptions for software and services based around the Drupal web content management system.
North Andover's Acquia Inc. reports closing a Series A round of financing.
Acquia attracted $7 million in a round led by North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, company officials said.
Acquia develops products based on Drupal, an open-source platform for Web 2.0 applications such as single or multi-user blogs, wikis, community networks, digital media portals, and core web content management. The Drupal platform has been downloaded more than 2 million times since it was released in 2001, the year it was originally created by Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert.
Founded only a few months ago, Acquia is a North Andover, Mass. startup that capitalizes on a content management system written by its co-founder in 2001.
Last weekend at Barcamp Brussels, I had a chance to talk to Dries Buytaert (also, see this video interview) about his recent announcement that he’s going to start a company called Acquia now that he’s in the final stage of completing his PhD from the University of Ghent.
Dries, in case you don’t know, is the guy that created Drupal a few years ago and has remained project lead for the development community ever since. He also founded and presides the Drupal Association that was set up exactly one year ago. He’s now entering start-up life with Acquia, and evidently Drupal is the center piece of the venture.
Dries Buytaert, the Belgian developer behind the Drupal open-source content management system, is launching a start-up to take parts of the effort commercial. Debuted in 2001, Drupal powers newspaper sites including Bluffton Today, New York Observer, SavannahNow.com and Dagbladet Information, but it has remained a non-profit project heavily supported by a developer community and a recently formed association.
