Acquia, a Drupal solutions provider, announced today that it has received a second Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Authorization to Operate (ATO) for federal customers using Acquia Cloud. FISMA compliance provides a path for government agencies to develop next-generation digital experiences with Drupal that incorporate the web, mobile and social communities.
Alfresco and Acquia announced today a strategic partnership to deliver business critical content applications to their customers.With this relationship, Acquia builds on Alfresco’s open platform to extend the web experience applications that enable customers to quickly build content applications that span traditional documents, structured editorial workflows and dynamic multi-channel delivery. The combination is expected to give customers the freedom to combine content, community and commerce capabilities into unified digital experiences in order to drive business results.
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, 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.
Some of the most enjoyable Drupal moments for me was the time I spent in 2009 testing Acquia's Search for Drupal. Acquia Search is a plug-and-play service within the Acquia Network, built on Apache Solr and available for any Drupal 6 site.
I think Acquia Search is probably one of the most significant services provided on the Acquia Network and the feature that will continue to attract businesses to not only Acquia but also Drupal.
So although I'm no longer on the Acquia network, I'm pleased to hear that new features have been added to this Apache Solr implementation.
Some of the more significant features being added to Acquia Search include:
A couple days ago, I posted CMS Report's Top Ten Stories of 2009. The articles listed were ranked by popularity based by how many times viewed and the rate that they were viewed through the year. Popular stories do not always signify well written articles or are always an indication of personal favorites. Each year, I write a number of content management or IT related articles that I love but for various reasons you the people didn't have interest in reading and sharing.
Below are some of my favorite articles written in 2009 that were not a part of the previously posted Top Ten list. If I had a Top 20 Stories list the articles in both of these listings would be included.
Passwords, user accounts, email verification. I have never liked requiring my website's visitors to register before they can leave a comment. There is a large segment of people that like to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave their personal information there. So from the beginning, I have always allowed anonymous commenting by unregistered visitors and for the most part, they quality of the comments haven't suffered. However, allowing for anonymous comments also invited my site into a war against comment spam. My latest weapon to do the fighting for me in this war is Mollom.
Not long ago, Acquia announced a new product/service called Drupal Gardens. In the announcement, Dries Buytaert gave his description of Drupal Gardens.
For those who have not heard about Acquia Gardens, this product will provide an easy on-ramp for people to experience the awesome power of Drupal without having to worry about installation, hosting and upgrading. Think of it as Wordpress.com or Ning for Drupal. Think of it as 'Drupal as a service'.
A couple days ago, Acquia moved Acquia Search out of beta and made it available commercially available through their Acquia Network service. Acquia Search is a hosted search service based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The technology supporting Acquia Search is based on the the Open Source Lucene and Solr distributions from the Apache project. While a free search module is already available in Drupal, as well as Acquia Drupal, Acquia Search is significantly different and geared toward the enterprise. Smaller but high traffic websites would also benefit from Acquia Search.
CMS Report has been beta testing Acquia Search for the past four months and we've had nothing but a positive experience with the service. In fact I feel as a beta tester I somehow didn't do my job since I didn't have any issues to report to Acquia. However, Acquia did acquire various usage statistics, email exchanges, and surveys from us that they still benefited from CMSReport.com's participation in the beta program. Since I know only enough about Drupal to be dangerous, if I can't break it then Acquia must be on the right track with this product.
Kieran Lal, Acquia, recently had the opportunity to give a presentation on Drupal in front of an information system's course at San Francisco State College. It's a good video for anyone that wants to learn everything they possibly can about Drupal and given only one hour to do so. I would have loved to seen more questions and answers on the video as Kieran is one of those people that responds very well when people present him with good questions and good ideas.