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.
John Willis recently published a post that equates social publishing with social networking. While the post is pretty good, and I agree with most of the points, I need to correct the bit about the definition of social publishing. It’s way more than social networking. Let me explain.
Social publishing is a blend of three categories:
1) web content management
2) social software (blogs, wikis, social networking platforms, forums, etc.)
3) web app frameworks
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.
