acquia

Welcome to the March 2012 installment of our what's coming from the open source projects in the next month. If you feel that your project was left out, we invite you to email us at pr@cmswire.com to have a project representative added to the list of people we contact for updates.

The Acquia Cloud is a Drupal-tuned platform as a service (PaaS) that currently hosts hundreds of Drupal sites, serving more than 5 billion http requests and about 1 billion page views per month.

At DrupalCon in Denver, DPCI, Achieve Internet and Blink Reaction were three of the vendors offering Drupal solutions for the enterprise.

Blink Reaction

Blink Reaction is an enterprise Drupal development company and an Elite Acquia Enterprise Select Partner. Blink Reaction's services include integrating Drupal with third-party applications, such as CRM, Alfresco Enterprise Content Management and Salesforce. In this expo floor video, Ray Saltini, Drupal Evangelist at Blink Reaction, explains how his company fits into DrupalCon.

Achieve Internet

Achieve Internet has built enterprise Drupal websites for big-name clients, including NBC Universal, Disney and Fast Company. In this video, Ron Huber, CEO of Achieve Internet, explains why DrupalCon is a good fit for his company.

DPCI

Joseph Bachana, President and Founder of DPCI, a content and DAM solutions provider, says that his company has a lot of experience in business challenges that need to be solved with digital asset management tools. I spoke with him at DrupalCon to find out more about the role Drupal plays in his company.

Bachana says that currently his company is working on refining the EMBridge module, which extends the image management functionalities of Drupal by connecting it to EnterMedia, an open source digital asset management platform.

He also has plans to integrate Drupal with Adobe's InDesign program and text editors, such as Microsoft Word and NeoOffice, which could be huge news for publishers. Imagine writing an article in your favorite text editor, which is connected to your Drupal site and with a few clicks the article is formatted with images out of your library and ready for the web. Then, a few clicks later, that same article is dumped into your InDesign template with a hi-res version of an image pulled from your digital asset management solution and ready to go to print.

Bachana admits that this is an ambitious project that could transform the way we publish across platforms. The challenge, he says, is scaling and getting partners who want to help out with the project. Frankly, I can't wait to see his vision become a reality, so check back for updates as his project progresses.

It’s a busy month over at Acquia, a provider of value-added products and services for Drupal. The company has announced a new Cloud API and a change in its leadership team.

New Cloud API

The new Acquia Cloud API allows developers to integrate capabilities provided by Acquia’s managed Drupal service, Acquia Cloud, even if they’re not hosted in Acquia’s environment. Developers can use the API to increase architectural consistency across environments without being forced to implement foundational features such as workflow, site management and provisioning from scratch.
The new API provides a number of features:

• Ability to integrate Acquia cloud developer tools such as continuous integration or management tools into all websites and applications, including those hosted on non-Acquia environments
• Triggering custom scripts and commands on workflow actions using Cloud Hooks
• Automatic provisioning to Acquia cloud from any Drupal distribution or using scripting interfaces

The new Acquia Cloud API is available now in beta for all Acquia Cloud customers by request. Acquia is planning a general availability release in April. Acquia will also be demonstrating the Cloud API at Drupalcon in Denver, which being held at the Colorado Convention Center this week.

New Leadership

In addition to announcing the Cloud API, Acquia has named content management industry veteran Joseph Wykes as Vice President of Global Channels. If Wyke’s name looks familiar, we reported about Percussion Software appointing his successor, Deidre Diamond, to President earlier this week. Wykes served as President at Percussion for ten years and led the company’s expansion in the enterprise market before joining Acquia.

In 2011, Acquia expanded its customer base to over 2000 and partner network to over 40%. Wykes' addition to the leadership team will likely further Acquia’s goal of making Drupal a more attractive option for the enterprise market. We will continue to watch Acquia to see if the new leadership team composition causes shifts in how the company markets itself globally.