VeteranCentral.com

Lunardi explains, “Acquia has helped us get the most out of Drupal. One reason we chose Drupal is its excellent security. Security is particularly important in building a community for a very security conscious group like America’s veterans. Using Acquia’s tools and support have helped us greatly improve site security as well as performance. They’ve shown us how to evaluate those issues correctly and given us a roadmap for how to improve.”

The proprietary tool that helped VeteranCentral.com attain a score of 98% is the Insight management suite. This tool distills experience from thousands of Drupal sites into a service available for any site hosted by Acquia. Insight analyzes measures for Drupal security, performance and best practices, sums them up in a score, and gives specific advice about how to fix any issues found.

“Acquia has the best Enterprise Drupal support around. If we get in trouble and the site goes down, I know somebody on their staff at any time of the day will get the site back up as soon as possible. We have submitted several critical bug reports already and have seen Acquia’s superior service in action. I knew we needed to invest in support because our reputation as a company depends on our ability to meet our community’s demands, or they will go somewhere else.

“Our beta site launched in January 2012. At this critical stage with our product, we need to attract sponsors to continue development of innovative tools to help veterans and their families. To do that, the site must be stable and provide value right now. We have relied on Acquia to help us achieve these goals, and they have really come through in big ways. I know that they are excited about VeteranCentral.com. They get what we are trying to do to support veterans online.”

The beta launch has been extremely successful. Veterans and their families have access to job boards, a resume builder, discussion groups, social networking, videos, podcasts and more. Lunardi says, “Our community is already beginning to develop. We are seeing repeat visits; veterans are using the services and creating content; many valuable connections are being made every day now on the site. We are changing lives for the better. We are giving people hope, serving the veterans so they can serve themselves.”

Lunardi also has big plans for the future: internships for veterans to engage with the community, storefronts to enable veterans to sell through the site, and a suite of mobile applications. “Drupal is the perfect platform for delivering our vision, and Acquia has a lot of experience that we can leverage to make it happen. They can say, for example, ‘If you are going to do that, use this module, and customize it this way, and that will plug into this mobile SLA that we have.’

“We are targeting spring 2012 for our full launch, and that means enormous growth potential. Acquia allows us to scale, with their large cloud and a ton of servers. If we see a traffic spike, they can move server processing power to handle the traffic within minutes. VeteranCentral.com can’t outgrow Acquia. With Acquia, we can empower millions of veterans and give them the solid, reliable support they deserve.”