When Acquia started in 2007, the company was at first “just basically providing services around Drupal, making sure people could be successful” using the open-source Web content management system, said Acquia CEO Tom Erickson.
Flash forward to Tuesday: When the company announced a new product (and new way of bundling its existing products) at its Engage conference, the two news releases that went out did not mention Drupal at all.
That wasn’t an accident. Acquia doesn’t actually have to bring up Drupal and open source—which aren’t valuable to customers in and of themselves—that much anymore, but rather just has to show why its cloud- and data-focused content services have utility value for Web businesses of all stripes.
For instance, Acquia's newest product, ContextDB, is a way of bringing diverse sets of data on customers into one central place, as a tool for boosting engagement with customers; there’s nothing about the product that is specific to Drupal, really.
It’s a definite shift for Acquia, a fast-growing company whose co-founder and CTO, Dries Buytaert, was the original creator of Drupal. Erickson said the new product—which should be particularly helpful to companies’ marketing and commerce initiatives—aims to help Acquia compete even more aggressively with legacy players such as Oracle, Adobe and IBM. “Previously we weren’t known to say that we have suite of marketing capabilities for the marketer, that help them leverage their commerce or content platform better,” Erickson said.
“As we attract folks 35 and under, the talent pool and the diversity that we can get is much stronger in the city than outside.”
Acquia has already been on a steady growth trajectory again this year: after achieving $68 million in revenue in 2013, the tally for 2014 should fall somewhere between $90 million and $110 million, Erickson said. “We’re ahead of our targets for the year,” he said.
Meanwhile, more changes are coming soon—of the real estate variety. The firm recently disclosed plans to move from its headquarters in Burlington to Boston’s Financial District.
“I personally felt we needed to be in the city, based around the kind of company we want to be. As a disruptor, we think you have to be in the middle of an environment where the talent is focused around that,” Erickson said. “As we attract folks 35 and under, the talent pool and the diversity that we can get is much stronger in the city than outside.” The plan is to move in early spring of 2015.
Here are a few more highlights from my interview with Erickson:
• Accommodating employees who live in the suburbs. Acquia plans to take some steps to help out employees who might be inconvenienced by the new headquarters location; those include a stipend, flexibility in their work hours (to enable dropping off kids at school or day care) and opportunities to work from home.
• IPO. “It’s possible” Acquia will look to go public in 2015; “we’re certainly big enough,” Erickson said. The company has plenty of cash, however—along with strong revenue results, it completed a $50 million funding round in May—so there’s little pressure to go public from a fundraising perspective. But whether or not the IPO happens next year, that’s still the absolute goal for the future, Erickson said. Acquia is “not at all” interested in being acquired, he said. “The mission of what Dries and I really, really believe in doesn’t lend itself to” outside ownership, Erickson said.
• Staff. Acquia is now at 535 employees, more than double from the 260 the firm had at the beginning of 2013. Hiring talented employees—not just in engineering, but also in sales and other areas—is the biggest challenge for the company, Erickson said. “Talent acquisition as a whole holds us up in our ability to deliver to new customers,” he said.
