Dries

This is really cool and very well deserved. Dries was selected by Business Week magazine as a Best Young Entrepreneur of Tech.

Dries is "among a handful of innovators who are building businesses and products aimed at other companies and who were identified in a survey of venture capitalists and BusinessWeek editors and readers as some of this year's most promising young technology entrepreneurs."

As the economy slumps, many entrepreneurs are looking past consumer Web sites to focus on products and services for companies

Dries has an interesting post on cloud computing as it relates to Drupal. There have been a bunch of recent announcements and things are generally heading in the right direction. According to Dries, getting Drupal in the cloud is all about making relational databases scale. Check it out.

drupal, cloud computing

“In my opinion we can now add the founder of the open source content management system Drupal (and its commercial startup Acquia) Dries Buytaert to the rock star list.”

In the world of technology we're always looking for the latest 'rock star'. Who is that next hot tech visionary that will build an adoring following of thousands?

In my opinion we can now add the founder of the open source content management system Drupal (and its commercial startup Acquia) Dries Buytaert to the rock star list. This week he launched Acquia with $7 million in funding. He also hosted a Drupal lovefest (DrupalCon Boston) which boasted over 800 attendees.

In the year 2000, Dries Buytaert created Drupal, a freely licensed and open source tool to manage websites, as a bulletin board for his college dorm. Since Dries released the software and a community of thousands of volunteer developers have added and improved modules, Drupal has grown immensely popular. Drupal won the overall Open CMS Award in 2007, and some speakers in Drupal's spacious developer's room at FOSDEM 2008 were dreaming aloud of its world domination.

Last weekend at Barcamp Brussels, I had a chance to talk to Dries Buytaert (also, see this video interview) about his recent announcement that he’s going to start a company called Acquia now that he’s in the final stage of completing his PhD from the University of Ghent.

Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert has had a productive year, even by his standards. He wrapped up his PhD, became a father, started a company (Acquia) with Jay Batson, and, oh yeah, continued to steer the good ship Drupal towards modular, multi-user Web CMS heaven.

We caught up with the man just before Christmas, and collared him for a quick chat about Acquia, Drupal and OSS.

What is the good news? Dries Buytaert, project leader for Drupal, is starting his first Drupal startup. The working name for the company is Acquia.