Acquia, a startup that commercially develops and distributes open source content management system Drupal, has raised a whopping $8 million in series B funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners with Sigma Partners participating. This bring Acquia’s total funding to $15 million.
Acquia, whose co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert created the Drupal platform in 2001, tells TechCrunch that the company will use the funding to help create and expand the market for Drupal in the enterprise world. Drupal hopes to expand its existing base of 200 subscription customers.
Acquia will also use the funding to develop new products and services. Over the past year, Acquia rolled out various products connected to its publishing platform, including Acquia Hosting, Acquia Gardens (think Wordpress.com for Drupal) and Acquia Training.
The Drupal platform is built on PHP and MySQL, with the purpose of giving those with minimal programming skills the ability to create interactive websites. Acquia, which aims to be the Red Hat of the Drupal community, was one of the first commercial entities to centralize open source development efforts.
nice… kudos to the Drupal team. Best open source CMS ever.
actualy the best open source CMS is wordpress Joomla / Drupal is a world of suck. I same a cruel but true rant about Drupal on slash dot and the author used theF world like a drill Sargent.
i <3 drupal.
Interesting. I think Drupal has a future in the www, but it’s no where near ready for enterprise. In addition, there are some excellent PHP application frameworks being actively developed (e.g. Zend), and it’s just a matter of time before community resources are put towards building re-usable social modules in the context of a free and open source CMS. With the upcoming release of PHP6, there are going to be changes.
Apples and oranges. Nobody says “Why use Wordpress when you can use Zend?” Zend is a framework, akin to a wannabe Rails, and Drupal is a full CMS.
You should read my comment again to understand what it is I’m saying.
And for the record, people do ask “Why use Wordpress when you can use Zend?” all the time. There is a huge difference between using a poorly coded CMS and a clean, forward thinking web application framework like Zend.
maybe you should just write more clearly.
and more often, people will ask, “why use zend when you can use wordpress.” in the real world, anyway.
why use zend when you can use .net?
This sounds like someone who hasn’t used Drupal.
Warner Bros
Sony BMG
MTV UK
Recovery.org
Etc etc.
All use Drupal to power sites/network of sites. This seems pretty enterprise to me.
Furthermore, the Drupal community is extremely solid and they have some insanely good programmers. And lastly, they are always cutting edge and their technology shows it.
Another report should be how Development Seed’s Open Atrium is a free intranet that can compete with Basecamp. And its only in Beta.
@aaron – Thanks so much for the mention of Open Atrium, I just checked it out and it looks awesome.
Dido on the mention of Open Atrium. Not only is their website kicka$$, but their product is great too.
200 subscribers. Did I read that wrong? How much do they pay? Seems weak.
I would generally agree with this and Acquia’s initial direction seems to as well.
They are first moving Drupal towards the mass market with their SaaS version, named Drupal Gardens. Then we can probably expect them to move more towards the enterprise as they address some of the common concerns there (e.g., workflow, LDAP integration, change management, module packs, etc.)
See our coverage:
http://www.cmsw...ws/topic/drupal
anon: Please let us know what definition of “enterprise” you are using. Coding standards with very high percentage of module adherence? Scalable to host sites getting tens & hundreds of millions of hits per month? Flexible workflow architectures to cater to a business’ specific needs? Centralized location for all community projects with thousands of active plugins available? Security team who audit not only core code but also *all* contributed plugin code available from the centralized repository and work with developers to proactively improve security? Extensive developer API system which allows for plugins to interact and build upon each other rather than needing to hack core files? Large number of consulting firms who have experience building massive sites? I’m dying to know!
Awesome.
The Drupal is an awesome product. I think comparing Drupal and Wordpress are like apple to orange comparison. Drupal has all the features required for a Enterprise and Commercial Content portal
Congrats Dries et al.
Fantastic, excited to know more possibilities and to build even more websites that connect, empower, and communicate…… congrats Acquia and Dries
congrats
Drupal just keeps getting better and better. Wow!
I design web sites using Drupal myself, it is flexible, powerful. The community is great.
Looking forward to the new version – Drupal 7!
Drupal is awesome, there are modules for anything you’ll ever need to build a site! Nobody gets fired for choosing Drupal
If I had a few extra $100M, I would break off some for these guys. Drupal is a quite amazing CMS. Moreover, Acquia is a pretty sweet Drupal distribution. They give it bundled with what I call required modules and allow for instant plug-in to the Acquia service (if you so desire).
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