Acquia's $8 Million Series B: 10 Plans for Drupal

I'm excited to announce that we just closed an $8 million Series B round at Acquia. (Our funding now totals $15 million.) The inside round included North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. We've been growing fast expanding our engineering, marketing, and sales teams. Overall, the company has more than doubled since I first started almost a year ago from about 16 employees to now 40 or so and now have over 200 clients! We've also expanded our product offering to include hosting, remote administration services, Solr Search, and a variety of other services that help people adopt Drupal easily, scale the software, and deploy projects with confidence and the right resources.

It's not only been an invaluable experience learning how to scale a venture-backed start-up, but its also been interesting watching and helping an open source community grow. The adoption of Drupal just about doubles every year, including the number of websites built off Drupal (the number is now around 400,000), core contributors, and the general number of companies building with the software.

Amongst many other goals, Acquia will continue to focus on these core areas:  

1. Reducing barriers of adoption through stack installers (enables you to run the Drupal software locally on your computer), usability, and services that help people use Drupal successfully. For example, Acquia is working on a software-as-a-service product called "Gardens" and "Fields" (scalable Drupal infrastructure) that will host Drupal sites in the cloud similar to WordPress' offering on wordpress.com

Another large part of breaking down barriers to adoption is simply educating the public about the benefits of open source and how they can utilize Drupal. A friend of mine, Dave Terry, who runs Mediacurrent, explained the importance of marketing and how it will play a critical role for Drupal:

More case studies, white papers, analyst reports, webinars, certification programs, open-houses, seminars, media coverage, etc. all leads to better credibility and general recognition. Information technology decision makers (i.e. CIOs, Directors, Project Managers, etc.) need validation and precedence that their idea to implement Drupal is not some trendy selection, but one cemented with well-grounded justification – choosing the bigger logo or brand will always be the safe play, but it’s certainly not always the smartest.

2. Increasing market penetration of the Enterprise markets. Dries Buytaert explained in a recent blog post that CIO's are starting to take notice of Drupal and why they're choosing the solution over propreitary vendors:

Many of the proprietary content management systems are difficult to customize, expensive, hard to set up, and slow to adopt new trends. Contrast that to an Open Source solution like Drupal and you get the exact opposite: all the code is made available, anyone can change it, it is very extensible, well documented, and massively adopted. Developers are plentiful, it is bleeding edge, and best of all, there is no license fee -- which matters a great deal in today's economy.

Furthermore, on the business side, Open Source companies get a ton of sales and marketing for free while proprietary vendors presumably have to put more resources into sales and marketing. In other words, Open Source companies should be able to win on all fronts: technology, sales, and marketing. And we do -- I see it in the Drupal community every day.

3. Enhancing usability of Drupal 7. The Drupal 7 User Experience Project has 4 primary goals:

A. Make the most frequent tasks easy and the less frequent tasks more achievable.
B. Design for the 80% of users.
C. Privelege the content creator
D. Make the default settings smart

4. Positioning Acquia as a 1 stop shop (support, hosting, remote administration). This primarily comes from providing customers with an opportunity to come to Acquia for both hosting and Drupal support instead of going to two separate company. This reduces a lot of headaches especially when the origination of problems are not clear. Although we don't have Acquia "Fields" out yet, we can build your hosting infrastructure based off your requirements and scalability needs.

5. Providing hosted faceted search to help business owners enhance the stickiness of their websites by enabling users to find content easier on Drupal sites. Acquia's hosted Apache Solr provides:

A. Faceted search (search filters)
B. Results sorting (date, type, author)
C. Results weighting (granular control over search results and ranking of content)
D. Content recommendations
E. Faster performance
F. Document search

6. Growing the Drupal designer community. It's been known that there aren't too many great themes for Drupal. This needs to change for the rapid pace of Drupal adoption to continue. However, it is a good sign that people are still adopting the software without the largest variety of free themes. It shows that people are willing to learn and need the functionality, flexibility, and power of Drupal above everything else. Co-founder of Acquia, Jay Batson, discussed the issue and goals of growing the Drupal design community by summarizing comments from the community. Another initiative called Design 4 Drupal, similar to the Drupal 7 User Experience Project, has also been put in place.

7. Providing cloud hosting services. I already mentioned Acquia "Gardens" and "Fields", but we've also launched our hosted version of Apache Solr for Drupal. We did this because the implementation and ongoing maintenance of this infrastructure can be rather daunting. Acquia's solution works right out of the box. All you need to do is install the module, sign up for a subscription, index your site on the cloud within minutes, and there...you're ready to go. Acquia takes care of the rest.

8. Build out Drupal training. There's still many people new to Drupal. I see it everyday at Acquia...people calling in and inquiring about how we can help them migrate to Drupal. While support subscriptions provide advisory services and technical support for decision making, module selection, and troubleshooting, we also have a host of other offerings including:

A. Jump Start Program
B. Performance Audits
C. General Site & Infrastructure Audits
D. Security Audits
E. And, general/custome consulting services

Besides these options, Acquia's productized training offerings will come from our Yellow Jersey project.

9. Assisting large Drupal websites scale their infrastructure, Drupal development teams, and traffic. Acquia has put together a power house team that has deep LAMP stack experience scaling some of todays largest Drupal and non-Drupal websites. Here are a couple bios from our team:

Dries Buytaert - Founder and project lead of Drupal. Tuned Drupal.org for performance and Drupal software. PhD in programming language optimization (title: Profiling Techniques for Performance Analysis and Optimization of Java Applications). James Gosling (inventor of Java and VP at Sun Microsystems) was part of his PhD defense committee. Published performance papers in top conferences. Co-founder of Mollom, a web service the handles 200 Million HTTP requests per month -- Dries is respsonsible for the design and architecture of the Mollom backend.

Jacob Singh - Built, profiled and optimized Amnesty International, serving a database of over 50,000 reports in 50+ languages with 4 primary site languages. Operating as a CMS / CRM Amnesty handles approximately 2m page views per month from 500k visitors with peaks of 40k visitors and 800k page views in a day when the annual report is released.

Kevin Rego - Kevin worked previously at Genuity, where he was part of a team that supported 3000+ servers for hosting customers like the Chicago Tribune. As a the Operations manager for Worldwinner he supported a site that hosted more that supported 60k users playing 100k+ plus skill games. Kevin has also built out architectures at Viximo.com building out multiple hosting sites for the companies products in a completely virtual environment with load based scaling ability.

Peter Wolanin - For Drupal 6, Peter was the lead contributor for the rewrite in Drupal core of the menu system which is the basic mechanism for routing page requests as well as for displaying internal and external links in organized hierarchies. His rewrite of the links portion of this system was focused on making it dramatically more scalable by restricting the amount of data loaded on each page by defining a new hierarchical representation in the SQL schema and queries for efficiently retrieving the data relevant to the current page. He also implemented for Drupal core a caching system for this menu data which improves page performance, as well as being involved in improving performance in Drupal 7 by reducing the number of SQL queries executed.

Kurt Gray - Kurt Gray has over a decade of experience in LAMP stack scaling and LAMP engineering. He has worked behind the scenes on several popular high-traffic LAMP-based web sites such as Slashdot.org, SourceForge.net, ThinkGeek.com, and Linux.com. These properties were hosted on over 100 dedicated Linux servers across two datacenters. During Kurt's tenure, Slashdot grew from 100k users/day to over 2 million users/day. All of the properties on Slashdot's network had extremely high availability and no security breach incidents. Just before joining Acquia was Kurt was lead developer at a Boston-area startup which built a fast, LAMP-based, high-volume, high-availability news crawler and search engine containing over 100 million recent blog postings and news items. Kurt's LAMP stack designs directly address scaling, security, and availability.

Kevin Hankens - At velonews.com, Kevin managed a site that would get between 500k and 1.2MM page views daily. The peak was in July during the Tour de France where last year we got just over 23MM page views for the month. The biggest day for unique visitors was ~ 183k. The VeloNews site had five web heads and one database server.

(There are many others, but this blog post has already become a bit too long.)

Point is...if you have a high trafficked Drupal site...we can help you make it scream!

10. Provide assistance to Acquia partners through joint marketing initiatives, sales support, and support to help them build the best Drupal sites possible. We've already done several joint webinars with partners

If you're working on an interesting Drupal project, searching for Drupal resources, interested in any of the above services, or would like to just talk about Drupal in general, then feel free to shoot me an email. (I work at Acquia and can answer all of your questions...well, almost all.)

I'm also interested in start-ups using Drupal. If that's you, I'd like to speak to you as I begin doing some research for an article I'll be writing on how start-ups can use Drupal for a prototyping platform.