Introduction

In early 2008, we outlined what we were going to try to accomplish over the year in building Acquia Drupal, the Acquia Network, and Yellow Jersey (our training program).

Many in the Drupal community told us it was helpful to them individually, as well as the broader community, for Acquia to be so open about our 2008 plan. Since that worked so well, it's time to give everybody an early look at what we're working on in 2009.

This year our focus is on improving Drupal and expanding its market visibility. Some of our team members like to translate this as "Helping a whole lot more people grow to love and use Drupal." To do this, we're focusing our efforts on solving a few key issues:

• Widening the net. Many people looking to build modern websites either simply don't know that Drupal can meet their needs, or they select another platform for some reason, e.g. some other platform appears to have more off-the-shelf templates available, etc. We want to increase Drupal's visibility and its suitability for those people, and then work on...:
• Reducing adoption hurdles. Once somebody does find that Drupal can meet their needs, we want to reduce the number of steps the site owner needs to do to assemble a killer site.
• Eliminating scalability concerns. And as a Drupal site grows, we want to make sure that site owners are not worried about Drupal scalability, and can grow their site as quickly as they need it, as big as they need it.

If we can help accelerate the use of Drupal, everyone benefits: More users can easily assemble powerful web sites, Drupal development businesses expand as successful Drupal sites seek new capabilities, and the number of people joining the Drupal community grows - making Drupal and the community stronger and more vibrant.

So in 2009 we'll need several products to meet different customer needs, yet keep the experience as uniform as possible. We also need to stay consistent with what both we — both Acquia and the Drupal community — provide. We've used this triangle illustration to organize our thinking.
During 2009 we'll be working on the following projects:

1. Acquia Fields. As of today, Acquia is offering Drupal hosting. Acquia Fields is our solution for site owners seeking to run their sites on cloud-based infrastructure.
2. Acquia Search. We'll next introduce a hosted site search service. Both Dries and Jay have already blogged about this, and we are just starting to recruit early Beta testers.
3. Acquia Gardens. The next big step is to introduce Drupal to millions of new users with a hosted service for anyone to create a social publishing-style site — with user accounts, user-generated content, social/community networking, and all the many things Drupal does so well.
4. Yellow Jersey. In parallel to all this, we want to grow the amount of Drupal expertise that exists through training. Yes, Yellow Jersey was a 2008 goal that we didn't complete. But work is already kicked off, and we'll deliver on it this year.

Acquia Fields

Acquia Fields for customers who want a one-stop hosting and Drupal support. Its targeted at large-scale sites that are seeking to scale Drupal to millions of users and page views, and need:

• Dynamic scalability – to handle intermittent increases and decreases in load;
• Multiple server deployments – for high availability and reliability on multiple continents;
• Flexible pricing;
• Support from Acquia's world class team.

We built acquia.com in the (Amazon EC2) cloud, both to reduce our capital costs as well as keep us nimble and able to easily expand as we grow. We've learned what works in the cloud and what doesn't. And we've had a rapidly growing number of requests to help our subscription customers, and our partners, build out similar infrastructure for their large-scale sites.

We're ready to help you today to build this; all you need to do is contact us.

Acquia Search

We're really excited about the excellent capabilities that come when you closely link the world's best open source CMS with the world's most powerful open source site search technology. Apache Lucene and Solr provide the site search magic, but they but can be complex to get running. Acquia solves the complexity problem by offering Solr search as a service in the Acquia Network. By installing the ApacheSolr module for Drupal on your site and linking it to our service, you get:

• Faceted search – enabling your visitors to find what they're seeking more quickly with search filters;
• Results weighting – allowing site owners to make some pages float higher in the results listing to improve ranking(providing more granular control than Drupal's default search weighting);
• Content recommendations – suggest additional related content to visitors and increase their time on a site;
• Faster performance than Drupal's built-in search, improving user response times;
• And a long list of other great features we have planned.

Acquia Search will be available whether you're hosting your own Drupal site, or whether it is hosted with Acquia (via Fields or Gardens.) This is a great example of how our Acquia Network Services provide value to all Drupal users - regardless of deployment style.

(PS - no codename for this one because we're close to launch, and we've already referred to this publicly without a codename.)
Join the Search beta program

Acquia Gardens

The Vision of everyone here is that "Anyone can build beautiful & powerful websites and applications without programming." (Oh, using Drupal, of course.) This means bringing the power of Drupal to a much larger group of people than it is reaching today, including non-technical people. Acquia Gardens is how we want to make that vision a reality.

Our goals are:

• Point-click simplicity. With a few clicks on our web pages, anyone can get a fully-functional Drupal site almost as easily as a Facebook or MySpace page - but get all the Drupal capabilities that these services can't provide.
• Flexible configuration. Simplicity does not have to mean cookie-cutter. We will provide tools to help site owners build the site they want.
• Improved content assembly. Content creation shouldn't be limited to those with rights to see /admin. Drupal already does a good job of opening up content creation; does this idea have more room to run? We think so.
• Social, semantic, community oriented. Simply delivering Drupal easily is a really good start. But it would sure be good if we could leapfrog the state of the art. We're doing some really cool things we think you'll like, and will want your friends to see and do, too.
• Provide bridges to more. We're committed to openness and will make it as easy as possible for people to either upgrade to a more powerful Acquia hosting product, or move onto another Drupal hosting provider.

To expand Drupal to wider audiences, Drupal's usability needs to improve. It's going to take the entire Drupal community to accomplish this. But we think we can help as Dries has shared with the community recently.

Yellow Jersey

If you are part of the Drupal community, you know one of the key factors holding back Drupal adoption is the shortage of Drupal expertise. It doesn't matter what level you're looking at — programmers, administrators, themers, ....

Our goal with Yellow Jersey is to address this by:

• Empowering Drupal trainers. Building and maintaining course curricula is difficult and expensive. If you deliver Drupal training, we'll provide the tools for you to efficiently and profitably provide structured training to your customers.
• Supporting individuals. With busy schedules and high travel costs, sometimes traveling to a class is out of the question. We'll have a path for those who want to learn on their own outside of a classroom.
• Staying current. Drupal moves fast. Whatever training is available needs to avoid getting stale. If we do our job right, training can adapt as fast as Drupal changes - keeping the curriculum fresh, and providing ongoing professional development possibilities to Drupalistas.

Managing the Drupal lifecycle with the Acquia Network

We settled on this 2009 plan because in our first quarter of commercial business, it became quickly clear to us that people have a Drupal lifecycle. They start with a simple test, then build their "real" site, which in turn goes through phases of increasing complexity / flexibility. Helping people manage their way through this Drupal growth cycle will improve their chance of and time to success. With their success, the community becomes stronger and grows.

As Drupal users expand their usage, data portability & mobility become important concerns. Drupal users should be able to easily scale and/or rehost their sites with a minimum of fuss — and without developing an entirely new deployment skill set.

The Acquia Network becomes an important component of helping people manage this lifecycle. Between helping with upgrade management, or providing centralized functional services that work no matter what deployment type you have, watch for us to continue to create services in the Acquia Network to keep you happy with Drupal.

Doing this together

As much as we're trying to do here, it pales in comparison to the power of the Drupal community. So as we execute on this 2009 Acquia roadmap, we hope we can work side-by-side with you to get it done, and help Drupal stay the best open source web CMS — on the road to becoming the most widely used one.

Looking back at 2008, we're glad to have helped the community get some really good things done. We played a bit of a role in putting on Drupalcon Boston 2008 — raising over $125,000 for the Association in the process. We facilitated work on some important Drupal advancements. We ask many on our team to spend significant work time on important Drupal-adoption-related tasks like the Drupal.org redesign. We're organizing code sprints, and helping anybody organize Drupalcamps.

We love being part of the Drupalsphere. We hope you can see something in our 2009 plan that excites you as much as it does us.