SaaS Drupal Service 'Drupal Gardens' Moves Towards Launch

By Brice Dunwoodie (@cmswire) Sep 3, 2009

6 comments

Drupal Gardens, originally labeled Acquia Gardens, has been one of the hot issues at this year's European DrupalCon in Paris. Gardens is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of the highly popular Drupal web content management system.

We sat down with Tom Erickson, Acquia's CEO, to discuss the Gardens project, the Drupal Theme Builder, Drupal 7 and Acquia's pathways to profitability. Here's what we learned.

A Gander at the Gardens

The Drupal Gardens product is very important to Acquia and very important to the Drupal community. This is what Tom asserts, and we believe him. Gardens is one of 3 revenue generating paths for Acquia. The other 2 are the Acquia Network (Drupal support and search services) and their recently announced Acquia Hosting.

Acquia's Drupal-based Business Model

It's widely know that Drupal has a steep learning curve. The Gardens project is designed to address this hurdle to Drupal adoption, as well as deliver a quick micro-site development platform, which Tom says is in high demand by enterprise customers as well as government and non-governmental organizations.

The goal in short is to become the WordPress.com of the Web Content Management space. This will be good for Acquia and most likely good for the Drupal community as a whole.

Based in Amazon's Cloud

Gardens is going to be based on Amazon Web Services, complimented by a special file system which Acquia has developed using some third party technologies. The system is approximately multi-tenant, but strictly speaking it is not a pure multi-tenant system, and higher-end clients may have their own instances.

Not Acquia Drupal, Not Drupal 7, Not all GPL

The Drupal that powers Gardens is not going to be the same Drupal that ships in the Acquia Drupal builds. There will of course be similarities, but most likely there will be more restrictions on what makes it into Gardens. Tom did state that security patches would make it into both release at approximately the same time.

Gardens is based on Drupal 7 but is not exactly Drupal 7. So much of the work that Acquia staff are putting in now, will be enjoyed by the greater Drupal community. This point is sure to win them some good will.

[Editor's Note: The Drupal 7 project is coming along nicely, but has seen a recent slip with the official code freeze date.]

One fact that may not win as many smiles is that some of the technology used in Drupal Gardens will not be released as GPL and will not make it into the community. From what Tom told us today, the new Theme Builder is in that category — it's a proprietary piece of technology that for the moment is for Acquia only.

Acquia's Theme Builder for Drupal Gardens

Quick to Build With, Robust, Cheap, Scalable and Portable

I can clearly see the market for a solution like Drupal Gardens. Drupal is a powerful framework with an exceptional community of contributers, consultants and general knowledge. Making such a resource more broadly accessible in a profitable way strikes one as a no brainer. The fact that the founder of the Drupal project and the founder of Acquia are the same person seems rather helpful too.

Blogging platforms like WordPress.com and Blogger.com are hugely popular and you can bend and twist them into being web content management systems, but don't kid yourself, they are not in the same game as a system like Drupal.