Acquia
Gartner puts Drupal in visionaries quadrant
A lot of Drupal people and organizations help promote Drupal. At Acquia, we also like to help with promoting Drupal. One of the things we've been doing since the inception of Acquia, is talking to analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, and the 451group about Drupal, and all of Drupal's successes. Almost all of that work is carried out by Acquia's marketing people, but I've been in several analyst calls myself. Recently, Gartner has included Drupal into its Magic Quadrant reports, and was most recently promoted to the 'Visionaries' category in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace.
Last year, Gartner classified Drupal as a 'niche player', meaning Drupal does well in a segment of a market, but that we had limited ability to innovate or outperform competitors. In this year's report, which was released last week, Drupal was promoted to the 'visionaries' category right next to Google and other big players. According to Gartner, visionaries align with Gartner's view of how a market will evolve, but they have yet to deliver against that vision.
Here is what Nikos Drakos, Research Director at Gartner wrote about Drupal's pomotion: "Drupal is in the Visionaries quadrant because of its use of the open source model to drive adoption and popularity, while providing enterprise services via organizations such as Acquia. Its strong content-centric, community and web application foundation is being rapidly extended with hundreds of modules, including many for collaboration and social interaction support."
Why does this matter? As most of you know, there are hundreds of web content management systems and not everyone has the time or skill sets to figure out what system to use. Plus, large organizations that are about to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a website project, don't want to make the wrong technology choice. Instead, those large businesses call Gartner, or any of the other analyst firms, to get advice on what technologies to adopt.
This is exactly why I started Acquia, and how Acquia can add value to the Drupal community. You might notice that neither Joomla! nor Wordpress are to be found on this graph, and that is probably because they have not been able to position themselves with analyst firms. By maintaining relationships with all of these analysts, and showing them all the great work we have done, we can get Drupal to the next level in terms of enterprise adoption. Needless to say, from my perspective, this is a big deal for all of us in the community, as it provides tremendous validation for Drupal, and will create more business for everyone in the community.
Robbie Williams using Drupal
A couple of weeks ago, Robbie Williams made his comeback on British television music talent show The X Factor, where he performed his new single "Bodies" for the first time live.
With his comeback also comes a website refresh using Drupal: see http://robbiewilliams.com. The site was developed by an Acquia partner based in the UK.
Speaking at MIT
I will be speaking at MIT on Monday, October 26 at 5pm in the Stata Center in Cambridge. I plan to talk about the state of Drupal, Drupal 7 and Open Source development in general. After the presentation, there will be some time for social networking. The event is free so you're all invited to attend!
On a somewhat related note, we have some intern positions open at Acquia to give people the opportunity to come and learn about Drupal -- students from MIT, Harvard or other universities interested in an internship at Acquia should certainly attend and approach me about it.
Climbing a mountain
The Acquia leadership team in October 2009. From left to right: Kent (support), Jay (co-founder), Bryan (marketing), Warren (sales), Lynne (marketing), Chris (engineering) and myself. Unfortunately, Tom (ceo) is missing from the picture, because he took the picture.
Free Acquia Hosting
Last week at DrupalCon Paris, we announced Acquia Hosting, a highly available cloud-based hosting platform tuned for Drupal performance and scalability. Technical details can be found in my announcement blog post.
Today, we are happy to announce that we'll start to provide free Acquia Hosting accounts to not for profit sites dedicated to promoting the adoption and usage of Drupal. For example, DrupalCamp websites and local Drupal user group websites would qualify for free Acquia Hosting. The program starts in October or November, but you can sign-up now if you have a site that qualifies.
In exchange for free hosting, we require that the footer section of each page displays "Hosted by Acquia", and that an Acquia logo is displayed somewhere on your homepage.
If your site meets the above criterion, and you wish to enroll in Acquia’s Free Hosting program, you can sign up and we'll let you know when we are ready to host your site.
Acquia Hosting now available
For a number of months now, my personal website ran on a development version of Acquia Hosting (previously referred to with the code name Acquia Fields). There is nothing better than eating your own dog food. You have to eat a lot of it, and you have to start eating it early on. Either way, today at DrupalCon, we announced that Acquia Hosting is commercially available. In this post, I want to talk a little bit about what we have built and why we believe it matters.
The $4 billion web hosting industry is fiercely competitive with thousands of hosting companies. Nonetheless, we believe that there is a market need for specialized Drupal hosting -- every day I see people struggle with hosting their Drupal sites. Our goal is to offer the best hosting for medium to large Drupal sites. Acquia's hosting offering will differ from generic hosting in at least two ways. First, our infrastructure will be carefully tuned and optimized for Drupal and our deployment tools will be streamlined for Drupal development. Second, we provide technical support for your Drupal site, the Drupal application, and all of the underlying infrastructure. Because we have some of the best Drupal people, we can help you scale your site to millions of page views, and more if necessary.
At the moment, my personal website is running on a 6 server cluster with redundant web nodes and database servers optimized for Drupal. Currently, the infrastructure is provided by Amazon AWS. The web nodes are load-balanced with Nginx and all content is replicated to two database servers that are configured in master-master configuration. Files are stored in a highly-available network filesystem on top of EBS volumes with frequent off-site backups. For deployment purposes, we provide each site owner a SVN repository which we use to keep all web nodes synchronized and to orchestrate the roll-out of multi-server updates. A staging server is also available. Everything is monitored with multiple triggers and notification methods in place to our operations team to assure high availability.
The creation and configuration of these server clusters is fully automated -- we can get large sites up and running with their own dedicated cluster in 10 minutes. While a dedicated server cluster is great for high-end Drupal users with huge or mission-critical Drupal sites, we acknowledge that most people have more modest requirements. While we can easily provision a dedicated cluster, we expect the majority of people using Acquia Hosting to benefit from resource sharing. Customers who are on a shared cluster will benefit from high availability, high performance, and virtually unlimited scalability at an affordable price. Unlike other providers' shared hosting offerings, our shared cluster hosting is optimized for Drupal sites and backed by support from Acquia.
To date, we spent most of our effort building out a scalable infrastructure that is highly-available. The next couple of months we intend to shift our focus to performance. We'll offer memcached servers, reverse proxies and integration with one or more content delivery networks.
We have a great team of people building and supporting Acquia Hosting. Barry Jaspan is the product manager and technical lead. Kevin Rego was previously part of a team that supported 3000+ servers for hosting customers like the Chicago Tribune. Jacob Singh built, profiled and optimized sites like Amnesty International. Paul Lovvik wrote rich Javascript applications that handled over 25 million e-mail inboxes. Kurt Gray has over a decade of experience in LAMP stack scaling and was responsible for scaling Slashdot.org, SourceForge.net, ThinkGeek.com, and Linux.com. Robert Douglas is the original author of the memcached module for Drupal, and helped build and scale sites for MTV UK, Sony Music, Lifetime TV and more. Kevin Hankens helped scale Velonews to up to 23 million page views a month. Peter Wolanin is the author of many Drupal 5 and Drupal 6 performance improvements, and together with Jacob Singh, built our scalable and high availability Acquia Search product. We also contracted with Narayan Newton who helps to keep drupal.org running. And this is just a sampling of the team's experience.
At Acquia, we like building products and services that push Drupal forward. Specialized cloud hosting for Drupal can provide a healthy revenue stream for Acquia, but high-end Drupal hosting is just as important for Drupal's continued adoption in the enterprise.
Drupal Gardens
Acquia had two big product announcements at DrupalCon Paris. The first was the general availability of Acquia Hosting, which I'll blog about tomorrow. The second is a status update on "Acquia Gardens" which we first announced in the beginning of 2009.
For those who have not heard about Acquia Gardens, this product will provide an easy on-ramp for people to experience the awesome power of Drupal without having to worry about installation, hosting and upgrading. Think of it as Wordpress.com or Ning for Drupal. Think of it as 'Drupal as a service'.
We announced that the final name for the product is Drupal Gardens. This service is Drupal, so including Drupal in the name emphasizes that point. Plus, this is all about promoting Drupal so we don't want to hide that. Our goal is to make the base service free of charge, and to introduce Drupal to hundreds of thousands of users. Many individuals and organizations want a killer web site, but have no idea that Drupal is a great way to build one or to connect with other websites. Even if they did hear about Drupal, few non-technical people succeed in installing and hosting a Drupal site. I believe Drupal Gardens could play a key role in promoting the viral adoption of Drupal, and the name Drupal Gardens is key to that.
For the same reason, I'd really like Drupal Gardens to stay close to what Drupal does, to work with module maintainers, and give back where we can. For example, it would be awesome if Gardens users could contribute to Gardens, simply by contributing to Drupal -- either by contributing to existing modules that we use to build Gardens, or to new modules that Acquia might contribute. Along the same lines, we want people to be able to export their Gardens site -- the code, the theme and data -- and move of the platform to a any Drupal hosting environment. By doing so, we provide people an easy on-ramp but we allow them to grow beyond the capabilities of Gardens without locking them in. These are the kind of win-win situations that I hope we can create.
We also showed a demo of the current state of Drupal Gardens. The product is in pre-alpha, but we wanted to give you an update and show what we've been working on. The main feature that I demonstrated in my Acquia presentation is a tool we developed called the "theme builder". The theme builder makes it really easy to build a beautiful design for your Drupal site from within your browser without having to write any HTML, CSS or Javascript. The theme builder is enabling technology, and certainly part of my vision of what content management systems should enable users to do: empowering them to quickly and easily assemble powerful websites without having to do any programming.
The theme builder comes with pre-defined themes to start from.
The theme builder comes with a basic layout manager.
The theme builder comes with pre-defined themes to start from, color palettes and a custom color selector.
The current plan is to be in the market the beginning of 2010. Gardens is built on, and depends on, the release of Drupal 7. While we don't yet have the exact timing for this (Drupal 7 is ready when it is ready), we do plan to start inviting people to start alpha testing in the next couple of months. If you are interested in taking part in the alpha program, or if you'd like to get notified about the progress of the product, sign up at drupalgardens.com.
