Like last year, I'll be attending the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) next month, on March 17-18 in San Francisco. Also like last year, I will participate in a panel discussion led by Michael Skok (Partner at North Bridge, Acquia Board Member and personal friend).

Yesterday I shared my 2009 retrospective on Drupal along with some predictions for 2010. Today, I want to reflect on Acquia's 2009, as for obvious reasons, Acquia has been a big part of my life in 2009.

On his very first day in office, President Obama directed all federal agencies to break down barriers to transparency, participation, and collaboration between the federal government and the people it is to serve. Last week, the Obama administration published the Open Government Directive (OGD). The directive, sent to the head of every US federal department and agency, instructs the agencies to take specific actions to open their operations to the public.

Today is a special day at Acquia: customer service day. We grew so quickly that our support team often find themselves working until after midnight to meet customer demands. Everybody in the company, from sales to engineering, including myself, will be helping in support today. Talking to customers, helping them where we can to make sure they are successful with Drupal.

I've posted a good bit about Acquia lately, because we had a lot of exciting things happening, and because I'm proud of the body of work that the Acquia team is producing, often in close cooperation with the Drupal community.

I'm very pleased to announce that Acquia has raised an additional 8 million USD in a Series B round of funding. As explained in our press release, the investment was led by our existing investors, North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. Combined with our Series A funding, this brings our total funding to 15 million USD.

Drupal.org recently featured a detailed use case about InterMedia Outdoors switching to Drupal. InterMedia Outdoors boasts a network of 16 websites, a portfolio of 15 magazines, 25 market-leading television productions, 2 syndicated radio shows, and more.

I've recently been thinking a lot about the freemium business model. For those unfamiliar with the freemium business model, it was first articulated by venture capitalist Fred Wilson in 2006:

"Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc., then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base."

It is a real honor and privilege that BusinessWeek included me on their list of top 30-and-under innovators for 2008. I'm very happy to see Drupal getting this level of recognition from the business world. What BusinessWeek only hints at, though, is the importance of all the thousands of people, including my new colleagues at Acquia, who are working every day to make Drupal great.