Frequently Asked Questions

What is Acquia?

We are a new software company. We will provide an incredibly valuable set of software and network services for the popular Drupal open source social publishing system. Our goal is to amplify Drupal and make it rock even better and louder for more audiences.

What will Acquia sell?

We will sell annual subscriptions for our software and services.

What software products will Acquia offer?

Our software products will include Drupal core, plus various contributed modules, and, potentially, non-Drupal software, assembled into packaged distributions. Our first planned distribution is code named “Carbon”, more information is available in the Projects section of our site.

In most cases, we will group together contributed modules as part of these distributions. In this way we’ll be providing our customers with “editorial review” of contributed modules, providing our insight into which ones are ready for widespread use (and when), much in the same way Red Hat or Ubuntu elect what/when to add to their Linux distributions.

What services will Acquia offer?

We are building a Drupal-tuned analogue of the Red Hat network, over which we can deliver a wide variety of electronic services intended to be useful to people developing and operating Drupal websites. Our first iteration of this service is an intelligent update notification service, code-name “Spokes”. See the Projects section of our site for more information on Spokes.

We plan to offer a variety of electronically-delivered services, with new ones regularly being added for the benefit of our subscribers.

In addition to our electronic services, we will staff a Technical Assistance Center (help desk) where our subscribers can go to get human help when they have an issue with their (Acquia) Drupal installation. Help will be available at different response levels for various subscription types.

Does Acquia claim to own or control Drupal in any way?

No. We do not claim to own or control Drupal in any way. Acquia is a member of the Drupal community, similar to any other organization. We want to see the Drupal community succeed and to do so, we will listen to and work with the community to advance Drupal. The Drupal Association continues to operate the drupal.org domain, Dries continues to own the Drupal trademark, and the Drupal community continues to set the technical direction of the Drupal project.

Who is behind the company?

Dries Buytaert (Drupal project lead) teamed with Jay Batson to co-found Acquia. While Jay is not as widely known as Dries, he complements Dries’ technical strength with business experience in running an open source software company. The last company he started was Pingtel, an open source enterprise-scale IP PBX, recently acquired by Bluesocket.

Who are the investors in Acquia?

North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures have invested in Acquia. See our recent press release for more information on our Series A financing.

Why start Acquia now?

Some critical stars aligned (team & market) that made it the right time for Acquia. First, Dries nearly completed his PhD work, and it was time to consider what he would do next; it is, of course, best for the Drupal project if his job involves spending the bulk of his time on Drupal. Second, Dries’ co-founder, Jay, was actively looking to build another open source software company at the same time Dries was considering what he would do next. Jay and Dries spent months forming a bond of trust between them about how this kind of company should be run (given the existing Drupal project, community, and shared goals.) Finally, Drupal has achieved a critical mass in the market that suggests the need for a company like Acquia. For example, at the Barcelona Drupalcon in September 2007, a number of Drupal users at large companies spoke privately to Dries and suggested that a company “backing” Drupal needed to exist in order to advance the use of Drupal in their organizations.

What is Dries’ role at Acquia and how will his involvement in Acquia influence his project leadership?

Dries is the co-founder and CTO of Acquia, and will obviously be working to make the company successful.

However, the entire team at Acquia strongly believes that Dries must be able to effectively lead the Drupal project where the community wants it to go - and not negatively affect the project due to our own needs. He must be able to continue to make technical decisions independent of Acquia’s commercial interests to preserve the overall health of the community and the project.

Therefore, Dries is expressly permitted to make decisions within the Drupal project that may not always be in Acquia’s best commercial interest. And we also expect that a portion of Dries’ time will be spent on activities associated with the project at large (vs. Acquia’s own software development). In essence, since the health and vitality of the Drupal project at large is extremely important to us, we’ve taken great pains to make sure that Dries is able to continue to act for the best interests of the Drupal community at large as he has done for the past 7 years.

What’s the relationship between Acquia and the Drupal Association’s?

Acquia is an organizational member of the Drupal Association, but otherwise has no formal relationship with the association. The statutes of the Drupal Association say that only individuals, not companies, can become a member of the Drupal Association’s Board of Directors. Board members can’t be a proxy for their company and are liable as individuals. Individuals in the employ of Acquia may be Board members of the Association but their fiduciary obligation is to the Drupal Association, not to Acquia.

Is Acquia a “fork” of Drupal or will Acquia “fork” Drupal?

No, and we will constantly strive to make sure such a thing does not happen. Acquia’s success is directly tied to overall success of the Drupal project - and to how widely adopted Drupal becomes. Our goal is to help increase the use of Drupal by a factor of at least 10 in the next several years. We strongly feel that the only way to accomplish this is to become part of the community and collaborate in making Drupal successful - not to fork or compete with it. We at Acquia will never succeed on our own; we will only succeed if we are part of a larger Drupal community, and work with the community to create a “rising tide” for all Drupal boats.

Note also that we are not seeking to make a closed-source version of Drupal. Not only does the GPL/PHP license preclude this, we simply don’t believe in the concept. At the same time, however, we may find a need to include some non-open-source code in our distributions, for instance, as part of a specific vertically-targeted solution. But Drupal/PHP modules / code cannot be closed source. If we have non-open-source code, it will always be code that runs “outside” of Drupal (e.g. outside the PHP interpreter that is running Drupal), providing some value outside of what Drupal itself does.

How will the formation of Acquia affect future Drupal development?

We will contribute to Drupal development just as other companies or individuals do today. Our contributions have to stand up to the scrutiny of the community. If our contribution volume is high, Acquia’s contributions may suggest new directions and possibilities for Drupal development. But we know open source is all about merit, not rank. We intend to earn the respect of the community by giving tons of contributions back to the project. We want Drupal to be a huge star among the ranks of Open Source Rock Stars, and we are committed to helping the future of Drupal development in any way we can.

Are there other open source companies that Acquia is modeled after?

Acquia is quite unique, but if we had to pick one other open source company, it would probably be Red Hat. Just like Red Hat, Acquia’s business model is based on an existing open source project with a broad base of existing GPL’d open source code, where there is a significant, widespread community active in software development, and where we can provide subscription-based services to help people be more efficient and effective when using Drupal.

How will Acquia participate in and give back to the Drupal community?

Our engineers will work with the Drupal community to fix bugs, to implement missing features, to write documentation or to help sponsor and organize community events. We will be in a unique position: our business requires Drupal to be a great software platform. Because Acquia’s success is driven by the overall success of the Drupal project at large, rather than the demands of any one customer, we are able to look broadly across Drupal to identify gaps we can fill that others are not. We’ll start by having a few engineers who do nothing but work on Drupal problems all day every day, and if we’re successful, this team will grow over time. We hope in this way we can simply be a “strong contributor” within the community’s overall effort to make Drupal better.

Furthermore, we will provide commercial support to those users for whom Drupal is becoming mission-critical software infrastructure. This is important to help the Drupal community reach out to new and different users. To do this, we may have to dive deep into some particularly thorny issues. Fortunately, having engineers working full-time on Drupal means we can devote resources to hard problems without being constrained by the needs of a single website customer, and work to solve problems everybody needs addressed. But we’ll rarely have either the resources or expertise to do this totally alone; we’ll always be seeking to work with the community on such hard problems.

Will Acquia compete with developers and consultants for web development projects?

Our main goal is to be a product company, not a professional services company. So, no - we don’t intend to compete with web development shops and consultants for services projects. We do note that, as an organization directly seeking to improve Drupal’s widespread use, we may from time to time seek to work with other software vendor partners to add functionality to link Drupal with their software. If such a project were to be very large, we may seek to get paid for that work.

How will updates for Acquia distributions stay in sync with Drupal core/contrib module updates?

In general, management of the timing between Drupal.org and Acquia distributions is considered a core value of Acquia’s business. Judgment decisions about how in sync distributions should be will be important for us to manage - for our customers and for the community.

In general, Acquia distributions will arrive slightly after the same item is released on Drupal.org. For each module that Acquia supports, we intend to run the module through a full automated regression test suite, perform a manual security examination, and fully document the module, resolve any inter-module dependencies, and make sure our TAC organization is trained and qualified to handle support questions regarding the module.

How do you intend to offer both commercial-grade support for Acquia distributions while enabling people to benefit from Drupal’s modularity and flexibility?

We recognize that this is a difficult challenge. On one hand, Drupal’s flexibility is what makes it great. On the other, it’s what makes it hard to swallow when a customer is first getting started, or requires stability above all else. Fortunately, we’re not the first to address this issue, either. RedHat faced the same problem with Linux.

What we expect is that following the Acquia distro path will lead customers to make choices about what is most critical on their requirements list and how they can best meet those requirements. In some cases, stability and supportability will outweigh custom theming or use of a great new module. In the long term, these choices will become another set of data points for the Drupal community at large to consider when making development decisions.

How will Acquia support a module that is included in one of its distributions?

Acquia will maintain an engineering organization capable of actively contributing to any module it adds to its distribution. It also means that the engineering organization will be capable of answering support questions.

A module (or other software) will not be added to Acquia’s distribution unless Acquia is satisfied that the module has been reviewed and tested for functionality, stability, scalability and security.

Once Acquia elects to include a module in its distribution, Acquia is prepared to become an “expert” in this module and to partner with the module’s current maintainer to advance the module’s capabilities.

How will Acquia make code contributions to the community and Drupal.org for modules it supports?

If Acquia determines a broad enough customer need to include a module in its distributions, but an available module does not meet Acquia’s standards for functionality, stability, scalability and security, Acquia’s engineering organization will actively add the code we believe is needed to fill any such gaps.

Acquia will work with the module’s maintainer to integrate these enhancements and fixes into the drupal.org code repository.

Alternately, if a module simply does not exist to meet a need, Acquia will create the needed module, and (of course) contribute it to drupal.org.

Acquia is NOT seeking to replace current module maintainers. Acquia seeks to provide help, code, and resources to selected modules and module maintainers to make these selected modules better for everyone.

How do plan to manage your Technical Assistance Center?

Creating a successful TAC is going to take lots of time and experience, as people develop the deep knowledge necessary to meet the service level commitments of our customers.

Fortunately, we’re not the first tech company with a large knowledge base required for TAC people to master. Additionally, there are well-established, best practices on to how to do this successfully. The first thing to get right is hiring and training. TAC people need to be serious techies; not just people who answer the phone. Then, we’ll be developing extensive training systems and certifications to develop the deep knowledge necessary to be successful. Next, we will create systems that capture knowledge - not just about Drupal, but about customers, etc. Good systems help support good TAC people. The third is metrics. We measure TAC on effectiveness. All in all, this job is about operational excellence; so we need to measure it to know how well we’re doing.

To what degree are Drupal community members who become Acquia employees able to maintain their independence?

We’ve already described how Dries will be able to continue to lead the community in the direction it seeks to go. As we hire other Drupal community members for various roles, their daily activities will be generally devoted to meeting Acquia’s business needs. However, any code we contribute, or any activities we perform, need to pass muster with the community in the same way any other community member’s activities must be acceptable. We believe the Drupal community is healthy enough to be self-correcting.

What does the formation of Acquia mean for organizations who are using Drupal for critical projects?

It means that soon these organizations will be able to get access to fully-tested and highly integrated Drupal configurations that are supported in the same manner as other software they rely on. They will be able to leverage value-added services that make Drupal even more powerful, reliable, and easy to use. And they can look forward to us offering an increasing array of ancillary products or services that will make Drupal an even more effective tool for building great social publishing websites.

Can you hire me to work full-time on Drupal?

We are hiring great developers and designers that are passionate about creating commercial solutions for customers using Drupal. We’ll have some developers that work directly on Drupal. We’ll also have developers that work on backend infrastructure or other technology that is separate from Drupal. If you want to join our team, contact us.

How do I pronounce the company’s name?

Long-ah, accent on first syllable. AH-qwee-uh