Acquia presented at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week, and Jeff Whatcott, who manned the Acquia stand, writes in a blog entry that most of the corporate types swinging past his booth had no idea what Drupal was.
Acquia’s mission, or course, is about changing all that, and making the open source Social Publishing (… as they insist on calling it…) platform a viable Enterprise content management/community product. If you remember, the company told us at Drupalcon Boston in March how they intend to achieve that. The first step consists of professional wrapping of the Drupal product, and will come in the shape of the subscription-based ‘Carbon’ product. Carbon consists of Drupal 6.x core and about 30 modules, some of which have been developed by the Drupal community and then vetted and tested by Acquia, with a sprinkling of modules developed by the company itself. The result is calculated to be analogous to a Red Hat enterprise subscription; a cast-iron, bug-free and supported version of a community-built product.
The second major product announcement in March was ‘Spokes’, and is a network service. Spokes will offer subscribers automatic updates, security updates and patches, personalized alerts and other remote services.
We were wondering how things were progressing along these lines, so we talked with Director of Marketing Bryan House, and got a progress report and picked up some details on upcoming products. The good new is that things are on schedule for the announced Fall launch of the company’s first products. The (ever-growing) Acquia team is beavering away on building the eCommerce store, on Network Services and on testing and packaging for the Carbon product. We talked about some cool new ideas for Acquia’s network services, and about a whole new departure for Acquia: Drupal certification and training.
