Content Management Matters ™

Acquia, the commercialization entity that resulted from the Drupal project, has finally released a private beta of Carbon -- its commercial Drupal distribution. They've only been talking about the project since the end of April.

Loopfuse and Acquia have announced the availability of the Loopfuse Integration module for Drupal. The module links Drupal installations to the commercial Loopfuse OneView automated marketing product. The module, funded by Acquia and Loopfuse, was developed to connect the Acquia website to OneView, and has been donated to the Drupal community and is available to download at Drupal.org (link below.)

Acquia presented at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week, and Jeff Whatcott, who manned the Acquia stand, writes in a blog entry that most of the corporate types swinging past his booth had no idea what Drupal was.

Acquia's mission, or course, is about changing all that, and making the open source Social Publishing (... as they insist on calling it...) platform a viable Enterprise content management/community product. If you remember, the company told us at Drupalcon Boston in March how they intend to achieve that. The first step consists of professional wrapping of the Drupal product, and will come in the shape of the subscription-based 'Carbon' product. Carbon consists of Drupal 6.x core and about 30 modules, some of which have been developed by the Drupal community and then vetted and tested by Acquia, with a sprinkling of modules developed by the company itself. The result is calculated to be analogous to a Red Hat enterprise subscription; a cast-iron, bug-free and supported version of a community-built product.

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.

Not only does Dries Buytaert get selected as one the top young tech entrepreneurs by BusinessWeek, but one of his newest ventures -- Acquia, has been chosen to launch their company at the Launch Pad - Venture Capital Edition during the web2.0 expo today in San Francisco.

DrupalCon starts in Boston today and this afternoon at 2.30 pm EST, Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson (with Kieran Lal) will stand before the multitude to explain exactly what Acquia will offer, when services will kick off and what it all means to the Drupal project. VP of Marketing Jeff Whatcott took the time to brief us at CMSWire.com prior to the presentation and we bring you the skinny in advance of that presentation.

Acquia's presentation looms large over DrupalCon: the future of the company is tied in so many ways to the future of the platform itself. Acquia's model has the potential to drive forward the Drupal project to ever greater success and to a greater degree of credibility for enterprise Web CMS users. Equally, the defection of the Grand Wizard Buytaert to the commercial realm may arouse suspicion of conflicts of interest; of putting Acquia before Drupal, of leeching dollars from bleary-eyed OSS coders toiling in their basements.

Will Jay, Dries and the blameless Kieran Lal be tarred and feathered, run on a rail and dumped in the famous harbor? We can only hope so - it'd make for a classic YouTube clip, and make for an entertaining lunch-time spectable for the Coding Marathon. Disappointingly, the presentation is unlikely to invoke such fury. Attendees will want to hear of synergies, of their aims being supported alongside Acquia's. And they will.

Because the executive summary of the Acquia project runs like this: Acquia needs a strong Drupal community. And the community needs the firm commercial hand of Acquia to drive the project toward greater levels of commercial adoption.

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