The announcement of the partnership is likely an unsurprising move for most involved in the open source content management and document management industry as similar partnerships with other content management providers and Alfresco have already occurred. Nor is this the first time that we've seen Acquia involved with integrating the Drupal CMS with the Alfresco platform. However, this is probably the first time we've seen Acquia and and Alfresco Inc. so publicly announce such a partnership for delivering products and services and perhaps this is a recognition that customers have need for better integration solutions in both product and services.
Acquia announced significant growth in revenue and bookings as the company’s open source solutions are becoming more widely adopted. Acquia’s year-over-year revenue grew by 108 percent in 2012. According to the Boston Business Journal, this puts Acquia's revenue for 2012 at $45.3 million. Momentum continued in the first quarter of 2013, as Acquia’s bookings increased 52 percent compared to the first quarter of 2012 and more than 15 percent over the quarter prior.
Acquia reportedly achieved significant growth in bookings and revenue as organizations accelerate their adoption of solutions to manage their digital experiences, particularly among life sciences, high tech, media, government and higher education. According to Acquia, with businesses of all sizes seeking ways to fast track their digital marketing efforts, increased demand for solutions that blend content, community and commerce have been particularly popular among chief digital officers, digital executives and digitally-focused CMOs.
For the past few years, CMS Report has generally not posted CMS announcements which only contained bug fixes and no new additional features. So, it's been rare for us to post the "point" release announcements for Drupal as Drupal only introduces significant new features in the new full version of Drupal (such as the forthcoming Drupal 8). However, Drupal 7.22 contains a lot of minor changes so we thought it was worth talking about. Drupal 7.22 was actually released a week ago, but I didn't have time to upgrade any of my Drupal sites until this week nor look at what was actually fixed.
What I find silly about this week's proprietary versus open source discussion is that I don't think proprietary is the biggest threat to open source. The biggest threat to open source is from within. Open source as a whole needs to do a much better job in preventing the discussion of Open Source Community versus Open Source Vendor from getting out of hand. Open source must accept the role commercial vendors have in their community or they will soon find their community is financially unsustainable and difficult to be taken seriously. Vendors must also prove to open source that the community is better off with them than without them or that vendor is going to have have little influence at the community's leadership table.
It takes awhile for open source as a community to respond positively to the changes that new or successful vendors may bring to their community. Most new vendors in open source soon realize that their standing in such communities is ranked not by their company's success but by how much they give or don't give back to their open source community.
The calendar is moving fast toward one of my favorite content management focused conferences, the 2013 CMS Expo which is hosted in Evanston, Illinois (near Chicago). This year, the conference will be held on the 14th, 15th, and 16th of May once again at the Hilton Orrington Hotel. Learning & Business Conference. This event is billed as a "Learning & Business" conference showcasing some of the world's leading content management systems and the people who power them. Whether the CMS you favor is proprietary or open source, focused on small business or enterprise, non-profit, government or commercial applications, there’s something for everyone at CMS Expo.
If you still need to register for CMS Expo, reading this article might help save you $100 from the full registration price.
Sitting on my desktop the past few weeks has been an eBook from the Aluent Group, Drupal and Joomla!: A Comparison of Project Processes and Costs. I probably would have not read this eBook if it wasn't for an acquaintance of mine, Justin Kerr, letting me know that he was a co-author of the book. I'm lucky to have read the book because I think in the sense Justin Kerr as well as co-authors Robert Nowak and Jet Pixel have hit a home run in their review and comparison of Drupal and Joomla.
I just spent much of my morning looking at all the great content management related stories CMS Report covered this year. Below are the top ten stories of 2012 that we posted here at CMSReport.com. The stories in this list are ranked based on the rate they were viewed since they were first appeared online.
I do not know when it exactly happened, but a number of years ago I decided to become a pacifist. I am a pacifist that is in the war of open source versus proprietary. In my opinion, the debate over licensing and software development processes is only mildly interesting as it is the quality of the end product that matters to me most. I walk the fine line of being an advocate for open source and a defender of proprietary software and admittedly I've confused a lot of people that have taken up a particular side of the argument. However, there is always room for reasonable civil discussions of any topic when new data and new perspective is given. This is perhaps why within the past week I enjoyed reading a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Acquia that shows the value of open source without necessarily attacking the value of proprietary software.
Acquia, a commercial software company that provides enterprise level products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system, recently reached another milestone confirming their company’s ability to deliver secure hosting services for government web sites and online communities. Today, the company announced that it has received a FISMA Authorization to Operate (ATO) for Acquia Cloud.
Acquia, the enterprise guide to Drupal, today announced that Gartner, Inc. has positioned it in the “Visionaries” quadrant of both the 2012 “Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management” and the “Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace.” Gartner evaluates vendors based on the completeness of their vision and their ability to execute.
