Acquia

The announcement by NYSE Technologies, the commercial technology division of NYSE Euronext, that it is expanding the terms of its partnership with the Warsaw Stock Exchange, illustrates how the exchange company expects to significantly increase revenue by commercializing its own technology.

NYXT, as the unit is known internally, generated $490 million in revenue in 2011, up from $444 million in 2010 and $363 million in 2009. Management says the company is on track to hit $1 billion in revenues by 2015. NYSE also sees commercialization of its technology as a wedge allowing it to develop relationships with blue chip customers for its financial exchange businesses.

Bob Kerner, chief digital officer for NYSE, says the technology organization has been able to ramp up to support this aggressive growth strategy by using Drupal, an open source application used to build web sites and tools for collaboration and knowledge management. Drupal was first released in 2001, but has gained in popularity since 2007. Kerner’s team also uses a software development methodology called Agile, which is characterized by rapid, iterative development cycles and close collaboration between developers and their internal customers.

Acquia has a famous founder and is the go-to company for millions of web sites.

Company: Acquia
Location: Burlington, MA
What it does: The support and hosting arm for companies using Drupal. Drupal is a popular free, open source content management systems used to build websites.
Founded: 2007
Funding: $38.5 million
Why it's hot: Drupal was written by Dries Buytaert when he was college and it organically grew into a massively popular CMS today.