Dries Buytaert

Cheers to the Acquia launch, which went really well. Hundreds of people signed up for a free community subscription. Also, check out Jeff Whatcott's blog post covering some of the blog posts, press articles, and Tweets about our new product and service offerings. Awesome!

After months of hard work, Acquia is now open for business! Starting today, everyone can connect their Drupal 6 site to the Acquia Network to take advantage of our services. Oh my!

The Acquia Network (previously code-named Spokes) is a hosted service that helps you with site management (update notifications, spam blocking, cron service, modification detection, etc) and provides real-time visibility into the health and usage of all your Drupal sites that are connected to the Acquia Network.

Second, the Acquia Network gives you access to Acquia's technical support team. Whether it is an installation question, a development question or a configuration question, our Drupal experts are ready to provide you with technical support. The kicker? Acquia Network subscriptions are available for every budget -- including a free community version. Give it a try!

Third, we are also releasing Acquia Drupal today. Acquia Drupal (previously code-named Carbon) is our Drupal distribution that bundles some of the best, most essential Drupal modules for building social publishing sites. Acquia Drupal is available for free, and all our bug fixes and improvements go straight to the module maintainers on drupal.org. Acquia Drupal defines the collection of modules that you can get technical support for.

Starting Acquia wasn't straightforward. To setup Acquia for success, it required hiring world-class people smarter than me, but that often lacked Drupal background, or even Open Source experience. It took a while before we hit our stride, but it is truly amazing to see how everyone got hooked on Drupal, and how much we have come together as a team. Thank goodness I didn't take that job at the bank, because I couldn't be happier. Everyone in the company is determined to contribute to Drupal's growing success, and with Acquia's offering, I think we can get Drupal into a lot of new and interesting places.

Going forward, you can expect us to help port more modules to Drupal 6 and to add more modules to Acquia Drupal to expand our support offering. You can also expect us to extend the existing network services in the Acquia Network and to see us add new network services that extend what we've started with update notifications, spam-blocking, and uptime monitoring. Details are available on our Acquia Drupal roadmap page (registration required) and on our Acquia Network roadmap page (registration required) respectively. And last but not least, you will continue to see Acquia employees be very active in the community. So buckle up, because this is only a glimpse of what is to come, and we're on the fast track now.

One of the things we're building at Acquia is a Drupal technical support center where customers can call for help with Drupal questions. We're busy setting up a phone system, a bug tracker, a customer tracking application, a knowledge base and more. We already have some great technical support people on board, but we're looking for more Drupal talent to staff our support center.

Specifically, we're looking for people that have the rare combination of mad Drupal skills (both Drupal configuration and Drupal development), a diagnostic mind, and what we call, the support DNA. Do you have what it takes and do you want to learn how to build a support center from scratch? Apply here.

Or be the first to refer someone who makes the cut, and we'll gladly mail you a check for $1,000 USD to $2,500 USD depending on the situation. See our technical support job page for details on our bounty program.

John Eckman of Optaros sat down with Jeff Whatcott, Acquia's Chief Communicator, to talk about Drupal and Acquia. Rock on, Jeff.

If you can't see the video above, you can view it directly at blip.tv.

I was recently interviewed by Barbara Vandenbussche for Jobat, a Belgian employment website with a weekly print magazine written in Dutch. The interview (PDF, Dutch) talks about Drupal, but also mentions Acquia and Mollom. It is the first time that Mollom was prominently featured in the printed press, and that needs to be celebrated with a blog post. Yay!

Last week in San Francisco, Jay and I spent some time at the Wired office with Wired's Michael Calore and Scott Loganbill. Of course, we took this as an opportunity to evangelize Drupal so we sat down in Wired's Webmonkey zoo to talk about Drupal and Acquia. Check out the transcript of our conversation that was published on webmonkey.com. Thanks for the office tour Michael and Scott!