Acquia Closes Record Year of Rapid Growth

Acquia Helps Customers and Partners Deliver Powerful Digital Experiences, with a Focus on the Freedom to Create and Innovate

BOSTON -- January 29, 2019 – Demand for the Acquia Experience Platform propelled the company to a record year in which it surpassed US$200 million in revenue. Driven by global demand for its open source digital experience solutions, Acquia added hundreds of new customers, including more than 325 enterprise customers since the beginning of 2018. Acquia provides a platform for Drupal, the world’s most widely adopted web content management system for enterprises.

Overall new subscription bookings grew 33 percent year over year, with strong demand across enterprise, midmarket, public sector, education and nonprofits. New subscription customers include Tata Steel, Rodan & Fields, Fannie Mae, the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Postal Service, Fiji Airways, Friesland Campina, Sanofi Genzyme, the Make-A-Wish Foundation and DraftKings.

Highlighted 2018 year-over-year results for Acquia include:

• New bookings for Acquia’s digital experience solutions grew 57 percent
• Channel-partner new bookings grew 52 percent
• EMEA-based new bookings grew 103 percent
• Gross profit grew 39 percent
• Adjusted EBITDA⁽¹⁾ grew 78 percent
• Free cash flow grew 84 percent

The company grew its R&D team by 45 percent in 2018 to accelerate the development of its suite of marketing and digital experience applications; Acquia enters 2019 with a workforce of nearly 900.

“Global brands are turning to open source to solve their greatest challenges, and our open approach helps companies build world-class digital experiences on their terms,” said Michael Sullivan, Acquia CEO. “Brands know success begins and ends with a great customer experience. With fantastic momentum as we enter 2019, we’re excited to continue working with our partners and customers and charting new territory together.”

Acquia Lift driving personalization for global brands

At Acquia Engage, company executives closed 2018 by sharing insights into Acquia’s R&D initiatives and product advances for the Acquia Experience Platform. During a 90-minute Innovation Showcase, brands such as Paychex and Wendy’s shared how they’re creating customer moments that matter through digital experiences delivered in part with Acquia. These development initiatives are laser focused on making Acquia solutions simpler to use with effortless scale, security, and performance.

“Every day we work to better understand who our customers are and why they engage with us the way they do. Personalization with Acquia Lift helps us gain critical insights and make every engagement with our customers more meaningful,” said Michael Mancuso, head of digital analytics for Wendy’s. “Being able to dive in and understand who our customers are requires deep insight across a broad spectrum of communication channels. Our team is continuously applying lessons learned and improving how we reach out customers. Personalization has been a major facet of our success and continues to be a very strategic part of our digital roadmap.”

Throughout 2018 Acquia unveiled more than 50 new capabilities to the Acquia Experience Platform, all of which were designed to deliver:

• Greater operational efficiency - including new features and enhancements around security, compliance (GDPR, FedRAMP, PCI), greater scale, reliability, performance, open source flexibility, governance, and faster deployments
• Improved agility to drive customer engagement - through machine learning, personalization, journey orchestration, experiential commerce and digital asset management
• Faster time to delivery - support for decoupled and progressive decoupled architecture, integration through open source innovation, tools and process support for continuous integration / continuous delivery, and greater automation

“Our customers need to respond quickly to business demands and market conditions. Acquia provides simplicity without compromising flexibility, which is a powerful advantage for every digital professional. No one else in the market is doing this today,” said Matt Kaplan, SVP product for Acquia. “We’re delivering a platform and simple-to-use tools that enable marketers, developers, and IT operators to create digital experiences quickly and without compromise. Our message of freedom is resonating with digital leaders who don’t want to be constrained by proprietary software and who need to leverage their existing investments in technology.”

Acquia Partners take Center Stage

Acquia partners are bringing amazing creativity and powerful customer experiences for many of the world’s best known brands, leading to 52 percent growth in new channel bookings for Acquia during the past year. Scores of examples of partner and customer success were spotlighted throughout the year in the Acquia Engage Awards program.

Decoupled architectures, web services APIs help drive Drupal 8 growth

Acquia is a pioneer in deploying headless and decoupled architectures for global brands. Acquia leverages Drupal’s best-in-class web-services API and provides a Node.js application service to enable decoupled architectures that power omnichannel deployments at scale.

“Decoupled architectures are a source of strength and differentiation for Acquia and provide a powerful advantage for our enterprise customers,” said Dries Buytaert, project creator of Drupal and CTO and co-founder of Acquia. “Entering 2019, we are more confident than ever before that an open, API-centric experience platform is best placed to solve our customers’ digital experience need.”

Acquia is the largest contributor to the Drupal project, and employs a team of experts who work on Drupal full time. This team provides critical product management, engineering, and contributor resources to the Drupal project to ensure releases are meaningful, stable, secure, and on time. They also lead and contribute to long-term project initiatives.

“Open source adoption continues to grow at a furious pace,” Buytaert said. “With our increased focus on making Drupal easy to use for marketers, content creators, and site builders, Drupal 8 is the open source standard for enterprise web content management and omnichannel experiences.”

Inaugural Global Survey on the State of the Customer Experience Unveiled

Last year Acquia unveiled its inaugural research report on the state of the customer experience. Titled Closing the CX Gap: Customer Experience Trends Report 2019, it exposes several disconnects between consumer and marketer experience and expectations. Specifically it reveals that marketers rate their effectiveness much higher than consumers, that consumers are skeptical of how their personal data may be used by brands, and that consumers expect personalized customer experiences. The research also found that marketers are looking to open source to solve these problems; 88 percent of marketers are looking to take an open source approach to their CX platform.

Acquia Again a Best Place to Work

Acquia once again was named a Best Place to Work, this time by BuiltInBoston, who ranked Acquia in the top 20 best workplaces recently in its annual survey based on compensation and employer benefits information. Acquia received high ratings from employees for its leadership and company culture according to Comparably, a platform that provides insights into workplace culture. Specifically, Acquia was honored in Comparably’s annual award program for Best CEO and Best Companies for Women for 2018.

Gaining Industry Recognition, Building Momentum

This year Acquia gained recognition as a leader by two leading analyst firms that follow the digital experience and web content management industries. Acquia was named a Leader in the Forrester Research, Inc. report: “The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management Systems, Q4 2018.” It was the second time Acquia was named a leader in that report. According to Forrester, Acquia received the highest score in the strategy category among all vendors. Also this year, the company for the fifth time was also placed by Gartner, Inc. in the Leaders’ quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management based on its ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Regional Expansion

With a thriving sales and partner network across Europe, Acquia opened its new European headquarters in central Reading, U.K. The new facility will support Acquia’s expanding operations across Europe. The company also hosted its first ever Experience Acquia event late last year in Paris.

Building upon its leadership team, the company appointed new leadership to help drive expansion in key markets across Europe, Asia, and Australia. Acquia appointed Cedric Demeulenaere as its new area vice president for Southern Europe. Chris Gibbs was named general manager for Asia Pacific and Japan. The company also has new sales operations in Latin America, Japan, and Singapore, all markets where the company is generating early success.

Acquia Engage Asia Pacific will take place 7 March 2019 in Melbourne, Victoria. Acquia Engage Europe will take place 17-18 June 2019 in London.

About Acquia

Acquia is the open source digital experience company. We provide the world’s most ambitious brands with technology that allows them to embrace innovation and create customer moments that matter. At Acquia, we believe in the power of community - giving our customers the freedom to build tomorrow on their terms. To learn more, visit acquia.com.

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^1.EBITDA is earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, amortization and stock-based compensation.