ICYMI: News & Notes from Acquia, November 2019

Welcome to our Acquia News & Notes series where we’ll recap top announcements, customer stories and media drivers over the past month! 

Acquia’s been making news all over the world this month from London to Ottawa to Munich and, of course, to New Orleans for our annual user conference, Acquia Engage! Engage was a rousing success full of inspiration from our partners, customers and our keynote, two-time World Cup champion and Olympic gold medalist Kelley O’Hara. With so many digital leaders in one space, it’s not surprising that the insights and conversations from Engage kept going long after the event itself had wrapped. 

Roy Varghese, CIO of NOAA Fisheries, expanded on his Engage presentation in an interview with DMN on why the agency chose Acquia to redesign and consolidate more than 20 of their websites. “We liked the openness of the platform so that it can be extended for the other products and services that we may or may not build on this platform, so it gives us maximum flexibility,” Roy said. 

We also had several publications cover the event and our news including Forbes, CMS-Connected and TechTarget. Some key highlights include: 

• “The Acquia survey offers a way for enterprises to up their CX capabilities. Personalization is key, with four of five consumers saying ‘brands that know their customers best will earn their loyalty.’ More than half (60%) said that brands who should know them, don’t.” - Forbes. 
• “Understandably, the audience was quite aghast at these stats. With those statistical bombs being dropped, personalization became the white-hot topic for conference participants; clearly, there is an urgent need for work to be done in this area.” - CMS-Connected
• “Acquia needs to remain heavily involved in Drupal, even though the investment of engineering resources might not show up as bottom-line revenue for Acquia's new owners, said Geoffrey Bock, analyst and principal for Bock and Company, an IT advisory firm in Newton, Mass.” - TechTarget 

Engage is always a unique opportunity to showcase our vision for the future and weigh in on how digital is transforming how brands communicate with customers. Mark Grannan, senior analyst at Forrester, offered his perspective on the Digital Experience Platform (DXP) market during his main stage presentation. Mark spoke on Forrester’s assertion that the rise of agile CMS signals a new era for the entire industry. He also expanded on the observation in his recent blog that “open strategies are being rewarded” in the content management space.

Acquia Founder and CTO Dries Buytaert also backed the belief that “open source has won” when it comes to the future of digital content in a five-part series for InfoWorld. Dries advocated for open source sustainability and encouraged more widespread contribution to open source projects as a way to move toward a more democratized web. “I believe open source to be the only way to build a pro-privacy, anti-monopoly, open web. This will require open source communities to be long-term sustainable—possibly for hundreds of years,” he wrote. 

Moving forward, Acquia continues to be a top advocate for the power of open source, the Drupal community and building better digital experiences. Check back next month for the latest news and innovations from the Acquia newsroom.