Drupal 8 Launch Accelerates New Era of Personalized, Multichannel Digital Experiences

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwired - Nov 19, 2015) - Today Acquia joins with the Drupal Association and a worldwide community of developers, businesses, and organizations in celebrating the general availability of Drupal 8, the new version of the world's most widely adopted, enterprise open source digital experience platform. Introducing hundreds of new breakthrough capabilities, Drupal 8 makes digital experiences extraordinary across all channels of customer interaction to deliver transformative business results.

In a fast-changing, mobile-first era, organizations need to innovate at the speed of customer demand. New channels and new devices compound the complexity faced by builders of digital experiences. Drupal 8 establishes the new standard for digital experience delivery with an object-oriented, API-based architecture that will enable organizations to deliver content to the right person at the right time on the right device today.

"Drupal 8 answers the call for a flexible digital platform built for the future," said Dries Buytaert, creator and project lead of Drupal and Acquia co-founder and CTO. "It provides a modern development framework, a reimagined user experience, and tools that empower builders to create digital experiences that are multilingual, mobile and highly personalized. It brings together contributions from more than 3,000 users and developers to deliver the most important advances in digital experience delivery the market will see this decade."

Drupal 8 brings many new capabilities for a new era of personalized, multichannel digital experiences. Among these are:

• Mobile-first: Allows content authors to publish content on any device. The entire Drupal 8 user interface has been made responsive.
• Multichannel, Dynamic Content Delivery: Delivers content "as a service" to any site, device, native application, or emerging channel with RESTful APIs.
• Front-end Flexibility: Embraces client-side frameworks like Ember.js, Angular, and Backbone so front-end developers can get creative with experience delivery.
• Enhanced Usability: Offers a reimagined, easier-to-use authoring experience, with a new editor tool and streamlined in-line, in-context authoring.
• Translation and Globalization: Designed to support global digital strategies, Drupal 8 transforms content management localization.
• Faster Development: Introduces an object-oriented web development framework and includes built-in Symfony components, staged configuration management, and improved unit testing support.
• Faster Dynamic Content: Accelerates content delivery with dynamic caching for personalized, data-driven user experiences.
• Integration into the Digital Experience Stack: Drupal 8's core architecture plus the Drupal module ecosystem and the ability to integrate with best-of-breed digital marketing tools make it easy to build diverse digital marketing and digital experience solutions.

"Drupal 8 is built for organizations that are thinking ahead. When it comes to digital, the future is here," said Tom Erickson, Acquia CEO. "Organizations that are driving digital innovation for competitive advantage can create the platform for their future with Drupal 8. Paired with the Acquia Platform, Drupal 8's advantages are unparalleled, giving organizations the speed, security and flexibility they need to innovate at scale."

"Organizations are under enormous pressure to deliver engaging experiences through an ever-growing number of channels and devices. The global brands we serve need flexible platforms that will empower innovation as their requirements evolve," said John Cunningham, Global CTO of POSSIBLE. "Drupal 8 is built to support digital transformation on a global scale. It brings capabilities that will help us deliver faster and drive our clients' success."

Drupal core contributors Angie Byron, Alex Bronstein and Wim Leers will join Dries Buytaert to share their insight on Drupal 8's new capabilities in an "Ask Us Anything" webinar. Submit questions in advance and plan to attend the webinar on Monday, December 7. Register at: http://acquia.com/d8team-webinar

Organizations can get started today with Drupal 8 on the Acquia Platform. Visit www.acquia.com/drupal-8, or contact Acquia to learn more about the Drupal 8 Readiness Workshop. Visit www.drupal.com for a showcase of organizations driving business success with Drupal.

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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