Team

Dries Buytaert CTO and Co-founder

Dries is the original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform. He serves as president of the Drupal Association, a non-profit organization formed to help Drupal flourish. A native of Belgium, Dries holds a PhD in computer science and engineering from Ghent University.

Drupal.org ID: Dries blog: http://buytaert.net
Tom Erickson CEO

Tom started his career in open source in 1980 (really). Except that it was called public domain software, derivatives were completely legal and hosting in the cloud was provided in Seattle by Boeing. Joining Acquia in 2008 was a return to those values and concepts after almost 30 years of supporting the airline industry, helping enterprises around the world adopt new software technologies.

Prior to Acquia, Tom was Chief Products Officer at map maker Tele Atlas. Before that, he was CEO of Systinet, a leading provider of SOA tools that was acquired by Mercury Interactive and subsequently Hewlett Packard. Tom has also held executive positions with webMethods, the Baan Company and Watermark Software in addition to his early days at MRO Software, known as Project Software and Development, Inc. in 1980.

Tom is passionate about many things, so don’t get him started. His diversions include wine, food, photography, skiing, golf and traveling to Australia. His roots are in Wisconsin, and received a BS Honors in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the UW-Madison. In addition to Acquia, Tom serves on the boards of Quickcomm Pty. Ltd. (Australia), SeeWhy Ltd. (United Kingdom), and TaskRabbit, Inc. (your neighborhood). He loves it if you compliment him on his youth sports photography.

Twitter: @tom_eric LinkedIn: profile blog: Acquia
Jay Batson Vice President, Co-founder

Acquia is the second technology company Jay has founded, and is also his second commercial open-source effort (the previous having been Pingtel, acquired by Nortel). Jay's passion is to build great companies that build products that make users happy. So at Acquia, he searches out new products and service opportunities the company can offer its customers to make Drupal more valuable to those who use it.

Jay is also a cycling fanatic - both riding, and being a fan of the Pro Tour. He earned his JD from University of Denver.

Drupal.org ID: batsonjay blog: http://underheadphones.com. LinkedIn profile. Twitter ID.
Chris Brookins Vice President, Engineering

Chris joined Acquia from Vertical Communications, where he managed engineering for several IP PBX and call center products, and lead a large adoption of Scrum. Prior to Vertical, Chris managed engineering at Stylus Innovation, a telephony toolkit startup that was sold to Artisoft. At work, he is passionate about user and developer experiences and facilitating high performance teams. He is the proud father of 2 boys and a very amateur photographer, cook, and tennis player. Chris earned his BS in computer science from Lehigh University.

Drupal.org ID: cbrookins LinkedIn profile. Twitter @chrisbrookins
Lynne Capozzi Vice President, Marketing

Lynne was previously the VP of Marketing at JackBe, a privately backed Enterprise Mashup software company where she was an Acquia customer and loyal fan. Lynne was also the VP of Marketing at Systinet, an SOA leading company. After the successful acquisition of Systinet by Mercury Interactive, she was the VP of Marketing of SOA for Mercury. Lynne was also the GM/VP of the Internet Applications Division at Lotus/IBM for many years.

Lynne's passion is running, and is a 5 time marathon runner. She has an undergrad and MBA degree from Suffolk University.
Gretchen FlemingCFO

Gretchen joins Acquia from Maven Networks, Inc., a leading Internet video platform provider acquired by Yahoo! in 2008. As CFO at Maven, Gretchen oversaw all aspects of Maven’s strategic planning, operations, financial, legal and human resources management. Prior to Maven, Gretchen served as CFO for MediaMap, Inc., acquired by Cision in 2003. She joined MediaMap from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, where she was a manager in the Audit and Business Advisory Services group. Gretchen earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Northeastern University and is also a Certified Public Accountant. In her free time, Gretchen enjoys kickboxing, skiing and traveling.
Peter Guagenti Vice-President, Services

Peter has joined Acquia with over 15 years of experience in strategy and client services; helping the world’s best companies innovate and succeed in the digital world while working at organizations as diverse as Razorfish and Accenture. He was practically “born digital”, and has been helping Fortune 500 clients embrace the web since the early days of the browser in 1995. Since that time, Peter has helped some of the world’s most recognized brands use the digital channel to grow existing or develop new businesses, reach customers with innovative and efficient marketing campaigns, and create the kind of sites and infrastructure that ensure painless expansion and growth as the web increases in importance to their business. Peter oversees our Services and Support organizations, where he brings an unrelenting focus on reducing costs and delivering results for our customers and partners.

LinkedIn: profile
Warren Utt Vice President, Sales

Warren has over 20 years of experience with software and services companies. Most recently, Warren served as CEO of Impress Software in Waltham, Massachusetts. Impress Software was a leading supplier of packaged integration software for the Enterprise Resource Planning market. Prior to Impress, Warren was Senior Vice President of World Wide Field Operations for BroadVision. Warren is the proud father of 2 boys and enjoys coaching basketball as well as playing tennis. Warren earned his BA from Hamden-Sydney College.
Tim Bertrand Vice President, Business Development

Tim came to Acquia from OpenSpan where he served as Vice President of Worldwide Channels, which included managing all worldwide ISV/OEM, Reseller, System Integrator and Public Sector relationships. Prior to joining OpenSpan, Tim served in various leadership roles including direct, indirect and Public Sector sales roles at Systinet Corporation (acquired by Mercury Interactive), Cape Clear Software (acquired by Workday) and Silverstream Software (acquired by Novell).

Tim graduated from Bryant University and currently resides in Sturbridge, MA with his wife and two dogs. Outside of Acquia, Tim and his wife own a semi-professional auto racing team & enjoy traveling.
Jim Salem Vice President, Platform Services

For the past 25 years, Jim has been a pioneer in internet hosting and distributed computing. Today, he manages Acquia's hosting services and infrastructure. Jim joined Acquia from Intuit where he co-created the QuickBase application-as-a-service platform and served as Architect, Engineering Manager, and Operations Manager. Earlier, Jim was Director of Web Hosting Engineering at GTE Internetworking (aka BBN Planet), and was a Senior Engineering Manager at Thinking Machines. He earned his S.B.E.E. from MIT. He resides with his family in Acton, Mass and enjoys playing drums, skiing, and hiking.
Kent Gale Senior Director, Technical Assistance Center (TAC)

Kent joined Acquia from Angus Systems and brings a range of customer support and operations experience. Previously he held operations and customer management positions at e-learning and telecommunication firms. Prior to that he built a world-class support organization serving customers on three continents and supporting multiple products at ON Technology. His "thing" is figuring out how to delight customers by assembling the people and systems needed to deliver great service and support. When not keeping up with his two very active girls he enjoys tinkering in his workshop, reading about new gizmos, practicing karate, and pondering the cosmos.

Drupal.org ID: kgale
Bryan House Senior Director, Marketing

Bryan joined Acquia from EMC, where he managed product and outbound marketing for Documentum’s collaboration, document management and search technologies. Prior to EMC, Bryan worked in product marketing and product management in the collaboration technology space, after brewing beer professionally for seven years. Bryan lives in the Boston area and is an ardent Red Sox fan, he earned his MBA at Harvard.

Drupal.org ID: bhouse blog: http://beerobserver.com
Matt Schlessman Senior Director, Professional Services

Matt joined Acquia from 170 Systems (acquired by Kofax) and brings with him 12 years of Professional Services experience working with large enterprise customers. At 170 Systems, Matt was a key member of the Professional Services Team and also directed several company-wide strategic initiatives that helped the company in achieving it's exit strategy. His roles included Program Director, Practice Director, and SAAS Program Director. Prior to 170 Systems, Matt was a consultant at Manhattan Associates. He has a passion for technology and helping customers succeed.

Matt enjoys spending time with his wife and 2 young children; he also enjoys running, biking, and swimming. Matt has a BSME from the University of Minnesota.
Robert Douglass Senior Drupal Advisor

Robert’s Drupal adventure started in 2003. Along the way he co-authored the first book published about Drupal, was technical editor of Pro Drupal Development, became the maintainer of numerous modules, and organized Drupal’s “Google Summer of Code” involvement. Robert loves classical music and open source software dearly, and looks to each as a source for motivation and optimism.

Drupal.org ID: robertDouglass blog: http://www.robshouse.net
Gábor Hojtsy Code Gardener

Gábor is an open source enthusiast and contributor. He started his open source work as part of the PHP.net team, where he was the documentation team lead. With experience organizing open conferences and meetups, reviewing books, teaching courses and collaborating on all kinds of open source projects, he settled around Drupal over the past few years. In his spare time, Gábor likes to sing and act, especially in musicals.

Drupal.org ID: Gábor Hojtsy blog: http://hojtsy.hu/
Barry Jaspan Senior Architect

Barry is an entrepreneurially-minded computer programmer with a strong focus on computer security and privacy. Prior to Acquia, Barry spent two years as a Drupal core developer; he also created interMute, the first commercial web annoyance blocker, and Spamnix, a spam-blocking product. Barry is a maniacal whitewater kayaker and rock climber and generally spends his time wherever rocks, water, and gravity meet.

Drupal.org ID: bjaspan blog: http://jaspan.com
Kieran Lal Community Guide

Kieran earned his nickname, Amazon, by following a dream that he was biking through the Amazon river basin. That spirit of adventure continues in his multiple roles within the Drupal community today. He enjoys hiking, wine, and his wife Denise's gourmet vegan cuisine in San Francisco.

Drupal.org ID: amazon blog: http://association.drupal.org/blog/67
Peter Wolanin Momentum Specialist

Peter Wolanin made the leap (or perhaps just one step in a biased random walk) from being Senior Scientist at a bio-tech to working on what he truly loves, Drupal. Peter spent a large fraction of his non-working waking hours in the last couple years re-working Drupal core and maintaining contributed modules. In the free time that he hasn’t devoted to Drupal he enjoys watching and reading science fiction, hiking, getting involved in politics, and working on his town’s environmental commission. Peter graduated Cum Laude from Princeton University with an A.B. in Physics and a certificate in Engineering Physics and then went on to obtain his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Michigan where his research focus was biophysics.

Drupal.org ID: pwolanin