Acquia Gets New CEO, Extends Drupal Searches, and More

Acquia, which offers a commercially supported version of the open source Drupal content management system is out with a series of announcements today. The company has a new CEO, Tom Erickson, who was formerly CEO of Systinet, which he sold to Mercury Interactive. Acquia has also announced a public beta of Acquia Search, a hosted service, as well as cloud-based Drupal hosting, and Drupal stack installers for Windows and the Mac.

Tom Erickson, Acquia’s incoming CEO, summed up what he sees as Acquia's and Drupal's value propositions in a statement:

“The economic benefit of Drupal combined with support and services from Acquia is very compelling as organizations expand their online communities and businesses.”

Since its launch, Acquia has focused on adding support and services for Drupal (the company was co-founded by Dries Buytaert, who founded Drupal). Acquia Search is a hosted network service, and can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 site. It delivers the capabilities of the Apache Solr search platform as a web service to Drupal web sites (OStatic is based on Drupal). Searchers can take advantage of faceted search navigation, content recommendations, and configurable results weighting. Acquia Search is built on a redundant hosted service infrastructure, with no servers to deploy or manage. During its public beta, Acquia Search is available free with any Acquia Network subscription. Free Acquia Network trials are also available.

"Providing search as a cloud-based service via an open source solution has the potential to draw the attention of enterprises interested in new search-based user experiences, such as faceted navigation and content recommendations. Especially at a time when it may be least affordable to invest in software licenses or to build the skills necessary to leverage these advanced open source capabilities," said Larry Cannell, an analyst with the Burton Group.

Acquia's new cloud-based hosting is aimed at enterprises who want to scale Drupal to millions of page views and users. It delivers support for multiple server deployments, and high availability and failover support services. The pricing is tiered according to usage.

The new stack installers from Acquia allow developers to install an entire open source stack: Linux, Apache Web Server, MySQL, PHP, and Acquia Drupal in one click on any local machine running Windows or Mac. The stack installers for Windows and Mac are available for free at Acquia.com, but there is not yet a stack installer for Linux.

Disclosure: Acquia is an OStatic sponsor.