Acquia's top marketing executive is switching roles.
Tom Wentworth, the outspoken CMO of the 710-employee Andover, Mass.-based digital experience provider, is moving to the role of senior vice president of product at Acquia. He will oversee a team of about 30. Wentworth, 43, will remain CMO until the company finds a new one.
Acquia on Move
An internal announcement was made in July about Wentworth's role shift. Company officials thought Wentworth's technical background would serve him well heading up product development. Wentworth agreed, especially since the move would be good personally — it gives him marketing, sales and now product development and leadership experience.
"I've always been a technology guy," Wentworth told CMSWire in an interview today. "Marketing is actually new for me. Acquia needed more senior leaders on its product team. And I'd love to run a company some day."
Acquia is up 40 percent in number of employees in the past year. It is bracing for the full release of the Drupal 8 platform that powers its software offerings. The bread-and-butter of that, of course, is a web content management platform that earned Acquia a spot as the lone open-source software leader in each of the last two Gartner Magic Quadrants.
One of Acquia's big moments in the past year came at its first annual customer conference, where it debuted the "Acquia Platform." Company officials said the platform upends proprietary, siloed IT models and brings together seven years of Acquia’s innovation around open source.
No Wallflower
"Shy" doesn't spring to mind when describing Wentworth.
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Wentworth’s always good for a debate on Twitter, in blog posts or in the comments sections on articles where he is quick to either defend Acquia, open source Web CMS or call out competitors. He also regularly writes columns on digital experience.
Hearing stories about the vast amounts of “shelf ware” still being sold by legacy WCM vendors.
— Tom Wentworth (@twentworth12) July 1, 2015He calls himself an "elder statesman of the Web Content Management industry," being involved since 1999.
"I like being loud not because necessarily it's my personality but I love this industry a lot and I get really angry when people are basing their observations off dated perspectives," Wentworth told CMSWire. "When the open source vs. proprietary conversation comes up ... I know the answer to that question. I get really mad when I see people or companies spreading untruths. I attack them quickly and straight up."
Wentworth became CMO at Acquia in December of 2012. Before that, he served as CMO at Ektron, which is now merged with EPiServer. He also held positions at Interwoven (2000-2007) and Autonomy (2007-2009).
Jake DiMare, digital strategist at Agency Oasis, a Boston digital agency, called Wentworth's move "really smart" for Acquia.
"There's a very short list of people in New England that know as much about content and experience management as Tom does," DiMare told CMSWire, "and I predict good things for Acquia's offering with him in this new role."
