Hanging with my Aussie Drupal friends: let's meet up
To celebrate Drupal's tenth anniversary and the release of Drupal 7, I have decided to go on a Drupal tour, to celebrate, educate and spread the word on all things Drupal. I'm kicking-off my Drupal tour with a trip to Australia.
It's important for me to meet with other community leaders around the globe and promote Drupal. While down under I will be meeting with Drupalistas and non-Drupalistas, Acquia customers and partners, press and analysts. My goal is three-fold: (1) to promote Drupal, (2) to gain insight from users and prospects on the choices they make when it comes to choosing a web platform and building websites, and (3) to figure out how to further improve Drupal.
If you would like to meet to discuss Drupal, community building, web platforms, photography or anything else please let me know! I am currently in Brisbane (a little tired from the flight), I look forward to meeting you Down Under.
Here is where I will be and when:
- 22-23 January – Brisbane: I'll be at Drupal Downunder.
- 24-25 January – Melbourne: there is a Drupal meet-up scheduled on January 24th at 6pm in the Belgian Beer Café Eureka.
- 26-27 January – Sydney: there is a Drupal meet-up scheduled on January 27th at 6pm in the The Lord Nelson Brewery Hotel.
For more details, keep an eye on the Drupal.org Australia group, my Twitter account and this blog. To schedule time with me please contact Laurie Vertuccio and Matt Ackley; they help manage my schedule while I am traveling. Looking forward to meet!
About to land in Brisbane where I kick of my Australia tour.
Happy tenth birthday Drupal
Today is Drupal's 10th birthday. Drupal 1.0.0 was released on January 15, 2001. Now, ten years later, we've just released Drupal 7: our best, most flexible, and most user-friendly version yet. After ten years, we haven't lost any momentum.
It's amazing to look back and see how far we've come. To see how much drupal.org and its associated sites have changed and evolved is exciting. To see that we have an active Drupal Association with a paid staff dedicated to the project is wonderful. Drupal, ten years in, has officially become a phenomenon.
Ten years ago, I had no idea that Drupal would become what it has today or that it would become such a large part of my life. And yet, I'm as passionate about Drupal now as I was then. I know in my gut that it seems that we have reached a critical mass of momentum that feels unstoppable. I also know that I'm as committed to this project and to this community now more than ever.
I also know -- and this part is the most important -- that Drupal is not only about software. The software is just the tangible byproduct of something much more greater; the community. You are the key variable in this equation, and you are the reason for Drupal's success. The value of Drupal is that, as a community, we've become greater than the sum of our parts.
For your work over the last ten years, in making Drupal what it is today, I thank you all. For your future work, over the next ten years, I thank you in advance. Happy 10th birthday, Drupal!
U.S. House of Representatives using Drupal
The United States House of Representatives has become the latest large government organization to transition their web presence to Drupal, and in a really big way. Currently the House hosts approximately 520 unique websites on a mix of over a dozen proprietary and open source content management platforms, and soon they'll all be powered by Drupal. When the House went looking for a platform to standardize their web presence on, they chose Drupal because it met their requirements to:
- Accommodate hundreds of independent websites, each with different sets of features.
- Provide the ability to deploy new sites quickly and efficiently.
- Enable House Members to use the web designer or developer of their choice by leveraging the Drupal community.
The House worked with a number of Drupal experts for this project, including Acquia, Phase2 Technology and Ingalls Information Security. The team developed, validated, and delivered the Drupal 7 platform that will be used by both individual House Member sites and Committee sites. Here are some examples of recently deployed sites (a complete list can be found at http://house.gov/house/news.shtml): http://sewell.house.gov, http://hanabusa.house.gov/, http://womack.house.gov/.
With the deployment of the House Drupal platform, the Chief Administrative Office (CAO) of the House of Representatives is soliciting Drupal development firms who wish to be vetted for an Approved Vendors List. These approved vendors may then be called on by various Representative offices and Committees (the End Customers). During the next phase of the project, End Customers will look to engage vendors to create custom websites on the House Drupal platform. These vendors can range from small to large firms and may provide services such as visual design, Drupal theming, custom module development, or other related services that the House may need. Each End Customer will have the authority to independently hire approved vendors to develop on top of the House's new Drupal platform.
The CAO will be accepting submissions to qualify vendors on an ongoing basis and is requesting an initial group of submissions by January 28th. If you are interested in being on the qualified vendor list, then please download this document for more information.
The intent of creating the list of qualified vendors is to make it easy for elected officials and other offices within the House to connect with vendors when they are in need of services. With the new House Drupal platform in production, and the freshmen class of the 112th Congress arriving in Washington this past week, there will be plenty of opportunities for qualified vendors.
Drupal on KPN building
How crazy can it get? In celebration of the Drupal 7 release, Druplicon is featured on the KPN building in Rotterdam from Wednesday January 5th until Saturday January 8th. Thanks SqyD and d7ra.org!
Drupal 7.0 released
Today, 3 years after the Drupal 6.0 release, we released Drupal 7.0 to the world. It is easier to use, more flexible, more scalable and 100% Open Source.
Drupal powers 1% of all the web sites in the world; with all the improvements in Drupal 7, I expect that number to go up.
About 1,000 people contributed to Drupal 7. It is a legendary piece of work, by the community, for the community. On Friday, we celebrate the release with 248 parties in 88 countries. Make sure to buy these people a drink.
Mollom 2010 retrospective
After my my 2010 retrospective on Drupal and my 2010 retrospective on Acquia, it is time to reflect on Mollom.
2010 was a good year for Mollom. We ended the year with 352 million spam messages blocked since our start in 2008. The number of spam messages Mollom blocked grew by 35% compared to 2009; 190 million spam messages were blocked in 2010, not counting our work for Netlog. Further, we ended 2010 with a spam classification efficiency of 99.95%. This means that only 5 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught by Mollom, an improvement over our 2009 efficiency rate that should be noticeable to our users.
The number of active sites protected by Mollom grew from 15,000 at the end of 2009, to almost 28,000 at the end of 2010. The number of paying customers doubled. In my 2009 Mollom retrospective, I wrote about how we were able to steer Mollom to profitability. That was a big win, because we're bootstrapping Mollom and it proves our business model works. In 2010, all profits were used to improve the service.
For example, we've made a lot of improvements to the Mollom module for Drupal. Among the most important include the ability to retain spam instead of discarding it, better spam protection for user registration, honeypot support, blacklist support, a refactored internal API with Webform integration as a result, profanity support, usability improvements, and more. We also ported the Mollom module to Drupal 7 -- and it's already used by thousands of Drupal Gardens sites.
We also used our profits to extend the backend team with two part-time engineers to give the Mollom backend a massive overhaul and to improve our operations. The new backend is not visible to our users, but it supports our growth and acts as the foundation of a number of new features and products that we hope to launch in 2011.
We also created more sophisticated tracking metrics like the average lifetime value of our paying customers. For example, the average customer lifetime for a Mollom Plus customer, averaged over the past 12 months, is 21.6 months. This translates to a monthly churn rate of 4.6% and an annual renewal rate of 57% -- calculated as (1-0.046)12. While that isn't bad for a company in our stage, it is something we want to improve in 2011.
Content on the web is growing exponentially. Most of it is spam or otherwise undesired content meaning Mollom has the potential to become 'the garbage collector of the web'. It is rewarding to know we blocked 190 million spam comments in 2010, but there is so much more we could do. I'd love for Mollom to get even more reach in 2011.
Our primary goal for 2011 is to build the best spam filtering and moderation tools available. Both by improving the user experience of our existing tools, but also by launching several new products and features. I'll post more about these in a couple months once we've some progress to show. The bottom line is that many organizations ponder how to manage user engagement more efficiently, and we believe that over time, Mollom can be a big part of the answer.
If you have concrete ideas on how we could improve Mollom, we'd love to hear from you in the comments. All things combined, 2010 was a great year for Mollom. We're stronger, better and bigger than in 2009, and we've created a great foundation for 2011.
Acquia 2010 retrospective
Yesterday I shared my 2010 retrospective on Drupal along with some predictions for the new year. Today, I want to recap Acquia's accomplishments in 2010, just like I did last year with my 2009 Acquia retrospective.
It doesn't always feel like it, but Acquia is still a very young company; 2010 was only Acquia's second full year in business (i.e. revenue-bearing year), but for a young company 2010 has been nothing short of remarkable. Our business grew by more than 400% and we went from 35 to 80 full-time employees. Drupal Gardens grew from 0 to 30,000 sites, we added over 100 large hosting customers to Acquia Hosting, and our subscription business has over 600 customers. Our client advisors solved more than 6,000 support tickets, and our hosting team now manages 500+ servers, up from 100 servers at the beginning of the year. Together with our partners, we hosted more than 40 webinars in 2010. 2010 is also the year were we started to see some great successes in our partner program. Throughout the year, we got coverage in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Forbes, Techcrunch, Mashable and more.
We beat our wildest expectations. Acquia is now one of the fastest growing start-ups in Boston. As a reward for exceeding our stretch goals, we're flying the entire company to Puerto Rico to celebrate. At the beginning of 2010, people doubted we'd even be able to get off of the ground, but by all accounts we're now soaring.
For me, a startup is a search for a scalable, repeatable business model. 2010 is the year where we arrived at several scalable, repeatable business models and as a result things started to really accelerate. In the summer of 2010 I moved to Boston so I could spend more face-to-face time with the team. By the fall of 2010 it was time to put the pedal to the metal and so we decided to raise additional capital. Much of the new capital will be used to help grow Drupal, to extend and improve our product offerings, and to grow our sales and marketing engine. In early 2011, Acquia will also expand to Europe.
I'm also particularly proud of Acquia's contributions to Drupal. We organized many code sprints, dedicated several of our best developers to Drupal 7, organized 4 free Drupal Business Summits to help promote Drupal in the enterprise, helped with the drupal.org redesign work, helped with the Drupal 7 upgrade and UX improvements of several contributed modules such as Media module and Webform module, created an open source social business software solution (Drupal Commons), and much more. The list goes on and on. Since Acquia's interests are so aligned with Drupal's, in everything we do, we try to raise the tide for the Drupal community at large. I'm proud of this because it is not trivial for a small company our size and stage.
Building a company is hard work and never without challenges. Fortunately, we have different challenges now than we had at the beginning of the 2010. When the first Acquia Network subscription renewals kicked in at the beginning of the year, renewal rates were below expectations. Today, our renewal rates are exceeding our expectations. Early in 2010, the rate of change of Drupal 7 APIs and number of critical bugs slowed down our progress on Drupal Gardens considerably. Today, Drupal 7 is almost ready to be released.
Going into 2011, there are two things impacting Acquia's future that still concern me; (1) the scarcity of great Drupal talent and (2) Drupal's growth. The demand for Drupal experts continues to be much larger than the supply -- it limits the adoption of Drupal by our customers, the growth of our partners, as well as our own ability to hire Drupal talent. Fortunately, it is not unusual in a fast growing segment and the community is launching many training initiatives to combat this scarcity. Together with our partners, we delivered 30+ training classes worldwide in 2010. It is still something that warrants further attention. Regarding Drupal's growth, it's great that we power 1% of the web, but considering the overall growth of web sites, we have to dramatically increase the number of sites being built just to even keep a 1% share, and we shouldn't settle for even that.
In general, I'm very optimistic about Acquia's future in 2011. In fact, I'm much more optimistic about 2011 than I was about 2010. The wind is blowing in the right direction. Cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) continues to be on the rise. According to IDC, cloud computing will be a $55 billion USD market by 2014. I believe cloud computing and SaaS could be two of the most important changes in the history of computing -- it fundamentally changes how both small and large organizations operate. If they do, we made the right decisions three years ago. I expect that by the end of 2011, Drupal Gardens (SaaS) and Acquia Hosting (PaaS) will take off big time. Open Source adoption continues to become more mainstream too. For example, at the current rate, Red Hat will be a $1 billion USD revenue company in 2011, a milestone that very few software companies ever reach, and certainly one no open source company has yet to accomplish. It's good news for all of us in the Open Source business.
In all, 2010 was a great year for Acquia and Drupal, and 2011 promises to be even better. In the next week or so, I'll provide more insight into Acquia's product strategy and the vision we've been working towards since Acquia's founding three years ago. If you're interested in our plans for 2011, keep an eye out for that blog post. That said, expect us to invest heavily in Acquia Hosting (e.g. additional self-service tools, friction-less release management and lifecycle management capabilities, etc), the Acquia Network (e.g. visual refresh, new services, marketplace for third-party services, etc) and Drupal Gardens (e.g. Views, partner tools, etc).
Needless to say, Acquia wouldn't have made it this far without our customers, our partners and our friends. We wouldn't be much of a company without you. Thank you for 2010!
