Acquia Enables BART.gov to Keep Riders Connected

BURLINGTON, MA--(Marketwired - Dec 11, 2013) - Acquia, where great digital experiences begin, today announced the successful migration of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) website from a proprietary content management software system to Drupal 7. The migration to Drupal, coupled with Acquia Cloud capabilities and Acquia's expertise, was completed on an accelerated, four-month schedule and gives BART increased agility and integration with key systems to deliver a digital experience that keeps its ridership connected and informed.

BART trains provide public transit service to more than 400,000 daily riders. As a result, BART.gov is a mission-critical website that provides real-time train schedules, trip planning and fare calculation, and a catalog of third-party apps for riders. BART.gov delivers 30 million page views to approximately 1 million unique visitors every month, with around 20 percent of traffic coming from mobile devices.

Keeping riders connected to real-time information is critically important for customer service, so the transit district made the resiliency of BART.gov a top priority during the project. The new site passed an early test when the BART system experienced a major service delay just five days after its site launch. Shortly after 7 a.m. on November 22, BART.gov traffic spiked experiencing more than 10 times typical demand as riders sought up-to-the-minute news about the service delay. Its new, highly performant website on Acquia Cloud operated with no errors reported, illustrating the significant benefits Acquia's technology and expertise.

"As a primary information source for riders, we need our site to have 100 percent uptime; we can't afford to be unavailable for customers when they need real-time information," said Timothy Moore, web services manager at BART. "Acquia and its development partner, Appnovation, tackled some complex integration requirements, including real-time APIs and other third-party web services. The time to market was incredible and the quality of work has been really impressive, so we're now exploring more ways to engage our customers through deeper experiences with access to content and community elements across devices."

BART's migration to Drupal was executed in an accelerated, four-month timeframe. Similar projects would generally be completed in six to nine months, but Acquia helped drive a rapid implementation to help BART achieve a timely transition from Adobe Publish, for which Adobe ended support. Upon launch, the site experienced zero downtime (even with the cutover from its proprietary software) and no impact to the ecosystem of third-party apps. As a result, neither customers nor any internal operations were adversely impacted during the transition.

"Every organization today must deliver a consistent digital experience for their customers, regardless of what devices are used," said Tom Erickson, CEO, Acquia. "Building resilient websites is difficult; lately it has been a well-covered news topic. We're proud that the work we did with BART stood up to unforeseen traffic spikes almost immediately after launch."

"The new BART.gov on Drupal gives the transit district the freedom to innovate with greater agility, resiliency, and integration," said Appnovation CEO Arnold Leung. "BART gains a highly performant site and the flexibility to add services quickly through the well-coordinated efforts of the project team."

For more information about Acquia's solutions, visit www.acquia.com.

About Acquia
Acquia is where great digital experiences begin. Acquia is helping some of the world's leading brands succeed, including Twitter, Mercedes Benz, Warner Music Group, and Stanford University. Join the more than 4,000 organizations that are moving at the speed of the web with Acquia's solutions for content, community and commerce. Acquia offers developer tools, cloud solutions and global expertise to drive success the open source way.

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