Acquia
OSBC wrapup
OSBC, the Open Source Business Conference that took place in San Francisco this week, just wrapped up. I'm sitting here in my hotel room, trying to digest all of the conversations that I've had over the past days and process the presentations that I attended (as well as trying to stay awake a bit longer). If you put a few hundred people from different Open Source projects together in one venue, there is a lot to consume, and even more to talk about in the hallways.
In addition to talking about Open Source for hours straight, I participated in a panel discussion led by Michael Skok (Partner at North Bridge and Acquia Board Member). Together with the other panelists -- Marten Mikos (ex-CEO MySQL), Ron Hovsepian (CEO of Novell), John Roberts (CEO of SugarCRM) and John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla) -- we discussed the future of Open Source based on the results of the Future of Open Source 2009 survey. The general consensus was that, for a variety of reasons, the down turn in the economy will have a positive impact on Open Source. The consensus was also that, as the "Open Source disruption" continues to move up the stack, the traditional web content management space will get shaken up in the next couple of years. I think that the Drupal project, with its larger ecosystem, will be there at the right time, at the right place. It is clear that Drupal will have an important role to play in this. I can't wait.
Other than the panel session, I gave a 50 minute presentation on building Open Source communities -- a topic close to my heart. The slides of my presentation are available here (20 MB, PDF).
I've talked to many Open Source business leaders in the last few days. I shared a dinner table with Jim Whitehurst (CEO of RedHat), Ron Hovsepian (CEO of Novell), Marten Mickos (the incredibly smart ex-CEO of MySQL), John Powell (CEO of Alfresco, whom I'd love to work with more), Zack Urlocker (VP Lifecycle Marketing at Sun, whom I still have to ask why he has a different hair style in every online avatar), and more .... I had conversations with Eric Gries (CEO of Lucid Imaginiation, an interesting new start-up built around Apache Solr), Navin Nagiah (CEO of DotNetNuke), Roy Russo (CEO of Loopfuse, the marketing automation tool that make Open Source businesses work), Chris DiBona (Open Source Manager at Google and role model for many of us geeks), Mike Olson (CEO of Cloudera, another hot Open Source start-up), Bruce Perens (who first defined the term "Open Source"), Mike Moody (VP of Engineering at Jaspersoft and all-around nice guy), John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla/Firefox), JD Lasica (the social media expert that I run into every time I'm in SF), Doug Harr (CIO of Ingres, who taught me a few things about European music), Lawrence Rosen and Mark Radcliffe (two world-famous Open Source lawyers), Jeff Sheltren (Operations Manager at OSL, who hosts the drupal.org infrastructure making them one of the top Drupal contributors), Dave Neary (Gnome foundation member and and a "real" Open Source guy), Rafael Laguna de la Vera (CEO of Open-Xchange and former SUSE exec), Mike Woster (Business Development Director at the Linux Foundation), Andrew Rodaway (Director of Marketing at Canonical, and who, together with Matthew Nuzum, is responsible for running ubuntu.com on Drupal), and many more. I can go on forever, but I'm sure you've got the point -- there were lots of great people to learn from.
Compared to the traditional, more developer-oriented, Open Source conferences like OSCON, FOSDEM, and Froscon, it all felt a bit like a "parallel universe". Open Source, all day, all the time, yet a different audience. One difference was that I didn't notice many representatives from our other sister CMS projects. I feel pretty strongly, though, that it's important for us to continue pushing the envelope in our evangelization of Drupal and that conferences like this produce many unexpected benefits. Attending OSBC helped put -- or will keep -- Drupal on the radar screens of many of the key players in our industry. Kudos to Tom, Jay and Bryan -- my colleagues at Acquia -- to help spread the Drupal word at OSBC.
From left to right: me, Ron Hovsepian (President and CEO of Novell), John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla), Marten Mickos (CEO of MySQL)
Microsoft promoting Drupal
Microsoft announced its Web Application Gallery at its annual MIX conference today. The exciting news for many of us is that Drupal is one of the first 10 applications to be included as part of the Web Application Gallery. Other open source applications including Wordpress, SilverStripe, and Gallery also made into the initial group.
The Microsoft Web Application Gallery follows on from last year's Web Application Installer, but it is even better. The Web Application Gallery allows you to browse and discover web applications that install and deploy well on Windows, and offers a simplified download/install experience for these applications and all of Microsoft's free web products that these applications run on. Just click the 'Install' button on the Web Application Gallery and you'll be guided through the installation process. For people running Windows Vista, 2003 Server, XP or Windows 7, the installer automatically configures IIS6 or IIS7 appropriately for PHP and Drupal, installing the required MySQL database and PHP's mod-rewrite rules and required extensions. Note that Drupal does not support Microsoft SQL, and that Microsoft will not automatically install MySQL at this point -- the installer prompts users to download and install Windows binaries for MySQL from mysql.com.
Because we believe this is an opportunity to introduce Drupal to hundreds of thousands of new users, Acquia worked with Microsoft to help package Acquia Drupal for the Web Application Gallery. When Microsoft approached us, we were cautious at first, but quickly realized this could be a great opportunity for both Drupal, and the Open Source community at large. We were further encouraged when the Microsoft Web Platform team provided us every resource we needed to get the job done in record time, including dedicating a full-time engineer to work with us. While not perfect in version 1.0 we are encouraged by this new direction.
One interesting aspect of this cooperation is that the actual Drupal code, along with the Web Application Gallery metadata, is all hosted and maintained by Acquia (not by Microsoft). Whenever we roll a new release of Acquia Drupal, the Web Application Gallery will automatically point to the latest version of Acquia Drupal. It is integrated in our testing environment and build loops. In addition, all support for this IIS-friendly Acquia Drupal package can be handled through Acquia's support forums.
This kind of arrangement makes things very scalable for Microsoft. Going forward, anyone will be able to submit their ASP.net and PHP applications for inclusion in the Web Application Gallery. If Microsoft chooses to push this hard, and markets these applications to the millions of Windows developers world-wide, it is likely we'll be seeing hundreds of Free and Open Source applications being added to the Web Application Gallery. Microsoft also told us that they are working on an SDK that will allow third-party applications, such as Plesk and cPanel, to integrate with the Web Application Gallery, enabling their customers to install all the Web Application Gallery software directly on their Windows-based hosting accounts instead of their local desktop.
Acquia Search goes public beta
At Acquia, we've launched Acquia Search in public beta today.
As I've previously announced, Acquia Search is a hosted Acquia Network service, delivering the capabilities of the Apache Solr as a web service to Drupal websites of any size.
Acquia Search is 100% free for now, and here is our marketing pitch: "Acquia Search can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 site, and enhances a site's search experience with faceted search navigation, content recommendations, and configurable results weighting, all delivered through a redundant hosted service infrastructure.". Put a bit more directly, Acquia Search is simply a great way to supercharge your site's search experience, without having to invest in your own Solr engine and development.
Though we're not sure how long our beta program will last, one of our motivations in providing a free beta is to help figure out the pricing model. There will likely be two main components to our price structure -- the number of nodes on a site and the number of search queries. The free beta will allow us to get a better feel for that.
But what about Drupal's built-in search module? This announcement doesn't mean that we'll stop enhancing it -- in fact, the Drupal 7 search module already has some improvements over the one in Drupal 6. There's lots of room in the "search" arena, with lots of different use cases, and it is hard for the core search module to compete with commercial-grade search engines while running on shared hosting environments. For a certain class of sites, including drupal.org, Drupal's built-in search is simply not an option, and we think Acquia Search can be a great fit for those sites.
Acquia Search is only possible because of the fantastic work of the many people who have helped make it a reality. The Apache Solr Search Integration project on Drupal.org, for instance, reflects the work of many community members, including Robert Douglass, Peter Wolanin, Jacob Singh, Damien Tournoud, and more. Thanks!
Acquia Stack Installer (aka DAMP)
If you're looking to evaluate Drupal, or if you're a Drupal developer, you have got to check out Acquia's Stack Installer, aka DAMP, that we released at DrupalCon DC today.
No doubt most of you are familiar with LAMP, MAMP, WAMP or XAMPP, which are installers designed to help people get started with PHP applications. DAMP is similar to MAMP, WAMP, and XAMPP, except that it comes with Acquia Drupal, and is specifically tuned for Drupal. The Acquia Stack Installer includes Acquia Drupal, Apache, MySQL, PHP, PhpMyAdmin, and an Acquia Drupal Control Panel.
The installer has been tested on Macs with OS 10.5 (Intel-based, not PowerPC) as well as all major flavors of Microsoft Windows. For Windows and Mac users, it is the easiest way to get started with Drupal. The installer is available for free, and is part of Acquia's efforts to simplify the Drupal experience for non-technical users. We think it will help the Drupal project grow. If you have friends, family, or co-workers that want to get started with Drupal, the Acquia Stack Installer is a great starting point.
While designed for end users, the installer is also good for web development. In fact, as part of our alpha testing, I switched from MAMP to Acquia's Stack Installer, and have already suggested some developer improvements for future releases. One will be to compile the Process Control Extension (PCNTL) into PHP -- something which is not available on MAMP or XAMPP. Enabling PCNTL allows SimpleTest to take advantage of multi-core processors; on a dual core machine this should cut the running time roughly in half.
Give it a try, and let us know if you have other suggestions or recommendations.
Tom Erickson joined Acquia as CEO
Acquia's subscription business has taken off as expected, and we are now launching a number of new initiatives as announced in the Acquia 2009 roadmap. With the coming release of Acquia Search, new projects like Acquia Fields and Acquia Gardens, all in addition to our existing subscription business, there is a ton of stuff going on at Acquia. We've set ourselves some very ambitious goals.
With all these new projects and opportunities, we needed additional management bandwidth in the company. Today, we're pleased to announce that Tom Erickson is Acquia's new CEO. Tom has had an important role in Acquia since our inception, as a member of our Advisory Board since day one, and as a Director on our Board for the past year. Jay, myself, and the rest of the management team have thoroughly enjoyed working with Tom. We've seen how much he can add to a company and so we really wanted Tom to take the reigns as CEO.
Tom has run both startups and large multi-nationals. Most recently, Tom was the CEO of Systinet Corporation, a privately held software company that was acquired by Mercury Interactive in 2006. He has also been Asia Pacific President of the Baan Company and International Vice President of webMethods. Beyond that, Tom has held executive positions at Filenet/Watermark Software and MRO Software.
I've wanted Tom to be an integral part of Acquia from pretty much the first time we met. We went out for sushi that day (I'm a sushi fanatic) and Tom ordered 5 different plates of tuna sashimi in Japanese. That evening, I learned that he has lived abroad for over 10 years and has picked up a smattering of languages (including Dutch) and other cultural insights. We spent a lot of time talking about Open Source, how to build a great business, and Drupal world dominance. I've learned a tremendous amount from Tom, respect his role as a mentor to Acquia, and have seen how he is able to help manage our team that spans several continents and time zones.
Bringing on a new CEO and expanding the executive leadership team is not unusual in a venture-backed startup. In addition to Tom, we've also added a VP of Sales, Warren Utt, who brings an extensive sales and operations track record to help us grow Acquia. Jay Batson, Acquia's founding CEO, will continue in a management role for the company and has his own thoughts to share about this -- including that Tom has been a first choice for this from the beginning. Like Jay, I'm very excited about the fact that we were able to convince Tom to join us full-time. Welcome Tom and Warren!
Drupal in the New York Times
The Drupal NYC group just hosted its sixth annual DrupalCamp on Saturday, February 28th, at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in downtown Brooklyn. Held the weekend before DCDC, the event was attended by some seventy people and can boast of something not many DrupalCamps have -- a writeup in The New York Times (subscription may be required).
As the article notes: "Drupal is free software used to run web sites, and participants at the event said they were drawn there, despite differences in backgrounds and ideologies, by a belief in an almost utopian form of technological cooperation".
It also takes a lot of cooperation to pull off such a successful event. Congratulations to all of the participants and event organizers, and a Thank you! to the sponsors, who included Acquia, Openflows Community Technology Lab, Open Green Map, and Siruna. Way to go, Drupal NYC!
DrupalCon DC
Drupal has thousands of contributors. About twice a year, we stop contributing long enough to have a beer together. We call that DrupalCon. ;-)
DrupalCon DC, or DCDC for short, is this week, and I'm leaving in a few moments to attend. DCDC's official events are held March 4th through the 7th at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. There is little doubt that this will be our largest DrupalCon yet. In fact, the conference has been sold out at 1,300 ticketed attendees since early in February (before the conference program was online!). With guests and volunteers, around 1,500 in total are expected to attend.
The conference schedule is great, featuring multiple tracks of workshops, presentations, and birds-of-a-feather meetups on all the important topics in our community. Special presentations include keynotes by David Weinberger and Chris Messina and a recap of the Drupal.org redesign by Mark Boulton. My regular presentation on the "State of Drupal" is Wednesday at 10:15am.
Acquia is a DCDC platinum sponsor, and Jay Batson, Tom Erickson and I are leading a presentation on Wednesday at 1:45pm providing an overview of Acquia's Drupal support model, our vision looking forward, and the newest products and services that we're launching this week. I'd like to invite everyone to attend, ask questions, and learn more about how Acquia intends to keep participating in the community.
Of course, DCDC is largely driven by volunteers, and many of them are hard at work already. It takes a lot to coordinate a huge event like this, and everyone involved -- from the local volunteers to the Drupal Association to the event planning staff -- has my thanks!
I'm looking forward to meet you all!
