Install profiles and monitored support make Drupal good for everyone - not just experts

Some technical minded Drupal users are fine and happy installing Drupal themselves. They know how to choose the modules and themes needed to make their project happen. Indeed, these savvy users have little need for support, monitoring, patching and consulting.

However, as Drupal's user base gets bigger, and larger clients like enterprises and universities sign-on to the open source revolution, the need for a technical support "safety-net" (in the form of someone keeping a technical eye to make sure everything is up to date and humming along) becomes more apparent.

At Raincity Studios, we know this need well. This demand is why we market the Bryght hosting product which includes a pre-selected and supported set of modules configured ready-to-go, out-of-the-chute.

We also know variety is a good thing. 'Tis better to allow customers to choose the service which best fits their needs than tell them "one size fits all."

With this in mind, Raincity Studios recently announced a platinum partnership with Acquia. Founded by new Ph. D and Drupal ringleader Dreis Buytaert and business-veteran Jay Batson (and a crew of Drupalatti), Acquia provide a commercially-supported distribution of Drupal as well as a subscription-based support network.

This model means that companies and organizations can confidentially use Acquia Drupal install to run their dynamic web presence and enjoy support and network services like uptime monitoring, update notifications, patches and Mollom spam blocking.

Much like the Bryght Basic install, Acquia Drupal is licensed via GPL and includes Drupal core and a suite of popular modules.  With this new offering, Raincity Studios customers will be able to choose between hosting packages for Bryght Light, Bryght VPS and Bryght Acquia.

Acquia Teams with Raincity Studios as a Platinum Development Partner

Drupal development and hosting leader set to deliver solutions with Acquia Drupal and Acquia Network

Two leading Drupal companies have teamed up to make the popular open source content management system a more accessible and practical choice for businesses.

In an agreement finalized at DrupalCon 2008, Acquia has announced Raincity Studios as a Platinum Partner on the newly launched Acquia Partner Program.

Dries Buytaert, project lead of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia, expresses his enthusiasm about the partnership saying:

"Raincity Studios is just the kind of company we seek for partnerships to help us transform the web - they have a history of innovation, participation and contribution to the Drupal community.  I look forward to future success together."

Another round of congrats to Dries and Jay for getting their Series A funding of $7M dollars for Acquia.

Dries says we might be thinking that's a lot of money -- nope, I don't think that! Our shared Drupal platform is something that is starting to compete with very large solutions and very large companies: we need well funded companies in our ecosystem to continue to help things grow. But also, to start spending some marketing dollars and to the "non development stuff" that it is very hard to do within an open source community.

It's great also to hear more from Acquia CEO Jay Batson. I met him at OSCMS 2007, where he had to pull some strings to be one of the last people into that oversold event. As the picture at left shows, he's a real person :P I'm sure the whole Drupal community will be interested in learning more about him over time.

I'm still working on what our combined team will look like here at Raincity Studios, as well as helping move a couple of projects out the door, but my role as VP of Product Development will likely align very closely with some of the development that Acquia is sure to embark on. Making Drupal easier and more usable, getting supported code from contrib over time, and helping with change management issues are just a few off the top of my head.

So -- congrats on the Series A from everyone here at Raincity Studios. Looking forward to the next round!

Well, it's about time.

Dries is finally done with his PhD work, and is kicking off Acquia, his commercial Drupal startup company. Dries' write up is fairly extensive, but there is also a FAQ on the Acquia site.

Dries explains that Acquia will focus on "Drupal distributions". I'd like to think that myself and the team at Bryght pioneered the concept of Drupal distributions: we've been running them as part of our mass hosting system since January 2005. It took a few more years to get "install profiles" into the core of Drupal, with the release of Drupal 5. There is still a ton of work to be done in improving the base infrastructure / code / APIs for install profiles, but it's the right direction.