Carbon Articles

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.

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.