Matthew Bull

acquia

Acquia is a company set up by Dries Buytaert, the guy who developed drupal, in an apparent attempt to get drupal taken more seriously by companies and institutions. The idea seems to be that Acquia (carrying on the water theme: druppel means ‘drop’ in Flemish) will provide commercial level support for drupal.

When a company or institution is considering an piece of open source software, having good support is always going to be a Big Thing. You don’t want to base your entire system support on the temperamental lone python hacker in your institution who knows how your open source code really works.

Without this level of support, drupal has until now tended to be taken seriously only by smaller companies and groups/departments within bigger institutions, who can generally manage their own installation.

There are of course tons of companies out there who already support drupal installations, but you have to take Acquia a little more seriously if only because the company is headed by the creator of drupal. There are also other supported open source CMS: Squiz’s impressive Mysource Matrix, and companies such as Netsight who support the normally very intimidating Plone.

It’s hard to tell whether Acquia will lead to a big shift in the way drupal is used, as Acquia seems to be a relatively new venture. Interesting nonetheless, and something worth keeping an eye on at least.