Introducing New Product Updates to the Acquia Platform

Our vision at Acquia is to deliver the universal platform for the world’s greatest digital experiences.  

As part of this vision, we continue to make investments in our platform that help our customers build, operate, and optimize their digital experiences with greater efficiency. Each quarter we release new product features as part of our long-term roadmap, which is guided by three key value propositions:

• Simplicity: Acquia continuously strives to make it as simple as possible for developers to build, deploy and iterate digital experiences that serve their businesses. We recognize that digital transformation can be complex and expensive. We don’t make people jump through hoops to use our products. With Acquia, there is no rip and replace — you don’t have to use our “full stack.” Instead, Acquia augments and integrates with what you already have, helping to lower development and maintenance costs overtime.
• Scalability: Acquia has always been focused on delivering scalable and reliable site operations to IT teams. We help them overcome the challenges associated with manual or redundant efforts to realize a compliant and secure deployment that no other vendor can match. Acquia runs some of the most demanding digital applications, and offers a battle-tested platform that can scale overtime to meet customers’ needs.
• Intelligence: Acquia naturally offers personalization and journey mapping capabilities that capitalize on our content management roots. Rather than putting up with the reality of data scattered across disconnected martech, Acquia helps marketers who aspire to personalize experiences and engage appropriately at each stage of the customer lifecycle. We leverage advanced data profiling and machine learning intelligence on your behalf to help you use the data you collect intelligently, driving actionable insight, so you can engage with your audiences.

This quarter, we’re excited to announce many new features across the Acquia Platform that are available today for our customers. These include:

Simplicity

Acquia Cloud

• Support for more than one version of Node.js runtimes: We’ve expanded our support of Node.js on Acquia Cloud to include Node.js version 8, giving customers greater flexibility for their front-end architecture. Node.js version 8 provides a variety of performance and API improvements over the previous version.  

Acquia Cloud Site Factory

• Single site staging: Acquia Cloud Site Factory customers now have the ability to stage sites on an individual level to their non-production environments. (This includes customers who are using Stacks.) The ability to stage sites independently of others (without losing previous work and/or data of sites already in the non-production environments) allows developers to work alongside each other, on different projects, without stepping on each other’s toes. This translates into faster development and testing in non-production development environments.

Scalability

Acquia Platform

• GDPR readiness: Acquia is ready for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that went into effect May 25. Since our founding, Acquia has put information security and data protection first. The GDPR is an important step forward in harmonizing data protection requirements across the member states of the European Union. We at Acquia have always seen GDPR as an opportunity to further strengthen and deepen our commitment to data protection by building upon the requirements set forth by some of the security frameworks and standards that we support such as the Privacy Shield, SOC 1 and SOC 2, among other standards  (ISO 27001, PCI-DSS Level 1, HIPAA, FedRAMP). We welcome you to visit our GDPR page for more information and resources.   

Acquia Cloud

• PCI compliance for Node.js Stack: Acquia’s Node.js service is now verified PCI compliant. Acquia Cloud customers with commerce use cases can now leverage JavaScript frameworks for frontend design with the assurance of PCI compliance.
• BigPipe for Drupal 8 customers (beta): Take full advantage of BigPipe in Drupal 8 on Acquia Cloud, using the page rendering technique pioneered by Facebook and LinkedIn. Design pages render the most important content to your customer first, increasing engagement and reducing your visitor’s wait time.   

Acquia Journey

• File connector for files stored in AWS S3: Acquia Journey now connects to AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) to read, write & orchestrate experiences based on data files in S3. Certain martech systems have file-based integrations and use S3, but they don’t have the ability to expose data via API. Journey already has ability to connect to REST API services, message queues, databases and  email services. For our customers looking to use data that exists in S3 for an experience orchestration process, Acquia Journey provides an easy way to retrieve and connect to data that resides in S3.
• Improved search and filtering of data schemas: We’ve made a usability enhancement that makes it easier for technical users to search, filter and link together data schemas in the Acquia Journey UI as they create journeys. This makes it easier and faster for our customers to find data that can be used to create customer journeys.  

Acquia DAM

• Improved asset synchronization between DAM and Drupal: We’ve made improvements for assets synchronized between Acquia DAM and Drupal for custom metadata, expiration behavior, increased scalability - providing a more real-time, full featured experience for our customers.
• Support for the latest version of Drupal 8.5: Acquia DAM now supports the latest version of Drupal 8.5, ensuring Acquia DAM D8 connector works with the newest release of Drupal and distributions for our customers.

Intelligence

Acquia Lift

• Machine-learning similarity content recommendations (beta): We have enhanced our content recommendations with new machine learning capabilities to automate content recommendations. This makes it easier and more efficient for marketers to personalize content for their audiences so they can see content similar to what they are currently viewing or have viewed in the past. With these capabilities, there's no need to do manual rule triggering, reformatting, or reclassification of content. With one click, marketers specify how they want the content recommendation engine to suggest content to their audiences.

Acquia DAM

• New dynamic templates: Designers, marketers and content owners can create easy-to-edit templates for end users to modify templates in a controlled way. This update lets designers use their time more efficiently, empowering non-designers to make their own simple changes to PDFs & images.  
• Usage reports of assets in Drupal: We’ve released a new capability that lets an administrator of Acquia DAM to see which assets and where within Drupal they are being used to save our customers time in having to manually find and track where digital assets are being used within Drupal.

We continue to make investments in our products throughout the year. To stay updated on new product capabilities, register and tune in for our next Acquia Platform Update webinar.