Dries Buytaert News & Articles

Show Acquia (news, site) the money, and it'll be nothin' new. The commercialized cure-all for the Drupal publishing system has raised a whopping US$ 8million in their second round of venture capital funding, according to a recent SEC filing.

The sizable chunk of moolah is just an addition to their nest egg, as the company scored US$ 7million back in December, during round one. First time around funders included North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Said Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia, "The funding allows us to quickly bring together a world-class team, rent office space, buy equipment, etc. Starting a great company is not cheap, especially if you have big dreams and plans."

The million dollar improvement certainly reflects well of the company, and we presume new CEO Tom Erickson (the "world domination" guy) is especially pleased. Before replacing Acquia co-founder Jay Batson in March of this year, Erickson was an active participant as a member of the Advisory Board.

Another increase in numbers includes the amount of funders. While Acquia saw three generous hands last December, a reported total of four reached out in March. The money is said to be for working capital.

Will Acquia divide and conquer? If things keep going the way they are, then we think some serious domination is definitely within reach.

After allowing Acquia Search to simmer in over two hundred and fifty beta tester kitchens for a few months, Acquia (news, site) has taken the product and added it to its selection of hosted Acquia Network services.

As we've discussed before, the semantic web is supposed to help with issues where computers just have no idea of what they're seeing in any context. The problem was getting people to take advantage of this technology in any real numbers.

Well, if you care about Search Engine Optimization (and who doesn't?) then it's time to wake up and smell the semantics. Otherwise, your search results will plummet as SEO gold goes to those who take advantage of Google's new tool: the Rich Snippet.

And Dries Buytaert of Drupal (news, site) seems to agree completely.

Acquia, the subscription based service and software company behind the popular open source web content management system Drupal, has made some new announcements that mean a change in management and exciting new things for the future of Acquia and Drupal.

With some interest we read recent commentary by Drupal project founder Dries Buyaert. He was meant to be providing pundrity on the future of open source. Some interesting points include:

1. Most people interact with and/or rely on open source much more than they realize
2. Mozilla Firefox, with a supposed 20% of the browser market, is in a large part responsible for bringing the face of open source to the consumer
3. "web master role that we used to know is dead. Publishing tools and content management systems, like Drupal, replaced them"

We can agree with all that. But there are two other points that go a little squirrelly with me.

2009 brings about promise, hope and most importantly change. And change comes in the fashion of newly elected leadership for the open source Web Content Management powerhouse, Drupal.

With the New Year not quite two months underway, Drupal has gone through the process of electing new leadership to spearhead their push into the future of content management. 27 applicants, some of whom were existing members reapplying, led to six new permanent members for a total of eight on the board. This brings the number of permanent Drupal members to an impressive 30.

Only weeks after Drupal invaded Germany with much success (despite some site issues), they are set to take over D.C. And with nearly two months to go before the conference, DrupalCon DC 2009 is sold out.

That’s correct. Every last one of the 1300 tickets has been sold for DrupalCon DC. Participants are set to matriculate from over 25 countries to hear a keynote from Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert. But this year’s conference, with its record breaking numbers, is set to offer a large amount of goodies.

Additional featured speakers include Larry Garfield, Josh Koenig, Addison Berry and Moshe Weitzman. General topics on the plate encompass core code, performance, design and usability, showcase and strategy, the Drupal community and site building.

Unfortunately, for those who had wanted to attend or who had New Year’s resolutions to make more quality conferences…you’re outta luck. But look for some great things down the road resulting from DrupalCon DC 2009.

Media sponsorships and press passes are still available. For information go here.

Other upcoming conferences:

• UGCX Conference - February 9-10 in San Jose, CA
• AIIM International Expo and Conference - March 30-April 2, 2009 in Philadelphia, PA
• EMC World 2009 - May 18-21, 2009 Orlando, Florida

Ovidius GmbH, one of the leading suppliers of XML-based Content Management Systems on the European Market, recently acquired EasyBrowse EP-Service GmbH. An established developer of solutions for electronic publishing, which aims to meet the special needs of publishing houses and the publishing industry, EasyBrowse is poised to expand Ovidius’ portfolio as supplier of end-to-end solutions for creating, managing and publishing technical documentation.

Acquia, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert’s new company, took to the stage last Thursday at the Launch Pad session at the web 2.0 Expo in SF. Although they didn’t win the people’s choice for best startup (this honor went to Triggit), their soon to be released Carbon and Spokes programs are still plenty enticing.

Who are the top young technology entrepreneurs according to a survey conducted by BusinessWeek? While we here at CMSWire we deeply disappointed our very own Brice Dunwoodie didn’t make the list, we were equally impressed that Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal did.

Dries Buytaert does not appear to be a man who likes to sit down and rest. He has just announced his newest startup Mollom — automated content monitoring — is available free in public beta.

Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert has had a productive year, even by his standards. He wrapped up his PhD, became a father, started a company (Acquia) with Jay Batson, and, oh yeah, continued to steer the good ship Drupal towards modular, multi-user Web CMS heaven.

We caught up with the man just before Christmas, and collared him for a quick chat about Acquia, Drupal and OSS.

“When I examine the landscape of open source projects that have had a big impact on the technology industry, I’ve concluded that projects which have had the biggest impact (usually) have a well-capitalized company behind them.”

- Dries Buytaert, November 2007

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert recently gave an interview with PC World, in which he let slip some of the delights in store in the next installment of Drupal — as well as some interesting information on where the software came from, and where it is heading.

Dries Buytaert, founder of the wildly popular Drupal Open Source Web CMS was recently interviewed on internetnews.com by Sean Michael Kerner.