Acquia Launches Next Generation Digital Experience Platform

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwired - Jul 13, 2015) - Acquia, the digital experience company, today announced Drupal 8 availability on the Acquia Platform, the leading cloud platform for unifying content, community, and commerce. Acquia customers and partners can now confidently harness the combined power of the Acquia Platform with Drupal 8 for new sites.

The web is currently undergoing a massive re-architecture, driven by the explosion of mobile devices and applications, the requirement to deliver personalized experiences to every customer, and the demands on organizations to embrace digital transformation. Legacy web content management platforms combined with on-premise or "false cloud" deployment models cannot deliver the agility large organizations demand. Acquia with Drupal 8 provides an unmatched platform for sustainable digital innovation.

"I believe the combination of Acquia and Drupal 8 delivers the most important advance in the delivery of digital experiences the market will see in the next 10 years," said Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder and project lead, and Acquia co-founder and CTO. "Drupal 8 breaks the mold for dated content management models and liberates content from the page for the post-browser era. Now we have the power to deliver the right content, to the right audience, at the right time, on the right device."

Drupal 8 provides more than 200 breakthrough new capabilities for customers including:

• Re-imagined authoring experience. Drupal 8 provides a new content authoring experience, designed to help authors quickly and easily create content.
• Mobile-first. The entire Drupal 8 user interface has been made responsive, allowing content authors to publish content on any device.
• Content as a service. Drupal 8 provides an API approach to content delivery, allowing content to be made available everywhere, including websites, mobile devices, native applications, digital screens, and the Internet of Things.
• Simplified deployment. Drupal 8 incorporates many of the most widely deployed modules from previous versions of Drupal into its core, speeding time to web for site builders.
• Go global. Quickly translate sites into any language. Drupal 8 is multilingual throughout.
• Developer productivity. Drupal 8 provides extensive enhancements for developers, including RESTful APIs, object-oriented development, simplified configuration management, improved unit testing support, and more.
• Improved performance. Drupal 8 includes caching improvements that speed the delivery of personalized, dynamic content.

More than 400 sites are currently running Drupal 8, and digital agencies and system integrators including VML, Mediacurrent, Phase2, Achieve Internet, Amazee Labs, Chapter Three, Elevated Third, Digital Bridge, Digital Echidna, Duo Consulting, FFW, Four Kitchens, ImageX Media, Motionstrand, OHO Interactive, Palantir.net, Promet Source, Trellon, and Zivtech, are adopting Acquia and Drupal 8 together.

"Drupal 8 redefines the way our agency and clients look at digital marketing. Coupled with the Acquia Platform, Drupal 8 represents a generational shift in marketing technology. We believe that it will be a great fit for our clients, who need technology to work for them, at their speed, on any device," said Jeff Geheb, global chief technology officer, VML. "With Drupal 8, open source has come of age. No innovation more vividly represents the power of a global community to accelerate progress in technology."

"Launching on Drupal 8 gives us the opportunity to be at the forefront of innovation and early in its development cycle, ready to adapt to the latest opportunities and technology solutions," said Jeremy Barrow, director, web strategy & execution at Manhattan Associates, which engaged Acquia and partner Mediacurrent to help launch its new site on Drupal 8 earlier this year. "With Drupal 8 we gained the powerful internationalization and responsive theming capabilities that we needed, and the Acquia Platform provides a secure and resilient environment for optimizing our sites."

Acquia is also offering enablement and training based on role and previous technical experience. The Drupal 8 Readiness Workshop assesses the current state of Drupal sites and lends Acquia expertise to the creation of a Drupal 8 roadmap for your application and your team.

"Our customers expect us to keep them at the forefront of digital transformation. Drupal 8 on the Acquia Platform provides broader capabilities for both simple and complex sites than any other alternative," said Tom Erickson, Acquia CEO. "Though Drupal 8 is still in beta, our team is focused on mitigating any and all risks with using it. We've helped many organizations go live already on Drupal 8 with the careful guidance of our expert developers and security specialists. We will be assisting with resolving key issues in our customer projects, ensuring their success as we have for the thousands of existing customers we have."

Acquia is committed to giving back and has a legacy of community participation and contributions. Acquia has been the single largest contributor to the development of Drupal 8, through release management, authoring experience and performance improvements, and sponsorship of key events. Acquia employs more than 150 Drupal experts, including a dedicated Drupal 8 engineering team who exclusively work on Drupal. Together, they have contributed more than 1,200 improvements and committed more than 5,000 patches to Drupal 8. In addition, Acquia has embarked on a program called "Drupal 8 for our Future," which encompasses several significant initiatives:

• Sponsorship and curriculum-creation support for programs such as STEM Fuse, which brings Drupal education to high school students nationwide, and 50 OSTraining Drupal 8 courses that will be made available on Acquia Cloud Free for anyone in July 2015.
• The creation of our own public Learning Management System for Drupal 8 training.
• Acquia U, a 14-week paid intensive training program that creates Drupal developers.

Organizations can get started today with the Drupal 8 on the Acquia Platform. Visit www.acquia.com/drupal-8, or contact Acquia to learn more about the Drupal 8 Readiness Workshop. Register for a Drupal 8 success webinar, co-presented with Mediacurrent on August 4, at www.acquia.com/manh-webinar.

Acquia Partners are ready for Drupal 8

"Large organizations looking to get started in transforming their digital engagement strategies should be looking at Drupal 8 now. Like Acquia, Phase2 is now bringing Drupal 8 forward to our clients as the leading tool for digital experience delivery."
-- Jeff Walpole, CEO, Phase2

"Drupal 8 with configuration management and its other powerful tools gives Chapter Three so many elegant new ways to solve complex business problems. Chapter Three is already using these powerful Drupal 8 features on large company site build projects. Is Drupal 8 ready to get started on now? Yes it is!"
-- John Faber, managing partner, Chapter Three

"Drupal 8's robust publishing features facilitate high-velocity publishing and will accelerate our work with enterprise media clients. Our clients want cutting-edge technology paired with enterprise standards and SLAs, which the Acquia Platform provides."
-- Todd Ross Nienkerk, digital strategist and partner, Four Kitchens

"Today's announcement allows us to go full speed ahead with Drupal 8 development. Built-in web services mean tighter integrations with the tools our enterprise customers already use. Paired with a mobile first approach, we anticipate taking even more business from legacy CMS competitors."
-- Jeff Calderone, managing director, Elevated Third

"Organizations across government, non-profit, and education require top-notch security, design and content generation solutions. We're guiding our clients as they plan their new sites on Drupal 8, and Acquia Platform support gives organizations the security and assurances they need to move ahead with confidence."
-- Andrew Kucharski, CEO, Promet Source

"Our team is very excited about Drupal 8. By adopting more modern, object-oriented code practices and the latest PHP standards, Drupal will remain the leading open source CMS for the constantly evolving Internet of Things."
-- Stefan Jensen, vice president, Motionstrand

"Drupal 8 will allow us to develop far more complex object-oriented, enterprise-class applications for our clients. Features like out-of-the-box mobile and enhanced application and data integration capabilities, paired with Acquia's resilient platform, open a pathway for elaborate cross-channel solutions and resonate with our clients looking to maximize their digital ROI."
-- Ed Hastings, president, OHO Interactive

"Drupal 8 is the most powerful and elegant version of Drupal I've ever seen. A perfect blend of usability improvements and integration points make this release a game changer in the CMS space."
-- Andrew McClenaghan, president, Digital Echidna

About Acquia
Acquia is the digital experience company. Intuit, Warner Music Group and Stanford University are among the more than 4,000 organizations that are transforming their digital businesses with Acquia's open cloud platform. Global 2000 enterprises, government agencies and NGOs rely on Acquia to create new revenue streams, lower costs, and engage audiences more deeply through content, community, commerce and context.

For more information visit www.acquia.com or call +1 781 238 8600.

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