And it all started in 2000, when Dries Buytaert, a student from the University of Antwerp (Netherlands), put together a small forum site to communicate with his colleagues on a daily basis. A year later, Dries decided to move his pet project forward, calling it Drupal (“water drop”) while publishing it online as Open Source Software.

In 2007, Dries met Jay Batson and founded a startup called Acquia with $7 million funding. The goal was to build an enterprise-class ecosystem of solutions and support with Drupal at its core. This allowed large organisations to benefit from an Open Source CMS.

Acquia grew successfully over the years, raising $173.5 million in funding up to 2019, finally being acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1 billion to establish further growth. You can read the full story of the Acquia brand in our post: The story of Acquia - from pet project to a $200 million company.

Acquia is a Digital Experience Platform - an integrated set of technologies allowing you to coordinate and manage all communications that your users experience online. DXPs are typically tailored for mid-sized and large organisations. Where in the past you had a CMS (Content Management System) side-by-side with your website, today you have social media channels, email marketing, photos and videos to share between different websites, along with purchasing mechanisms online.

Acquia is divided into 2 areas: technical (Drupal Cloud) and marketing (Marketing Cloud). With such a complex offer, you have all the tools you need in one standard, which is crucial for data integration and standards simplicity.

The architecture and solutions are tailor-made for Drupal; and with the same person behind both Drupal and Acquia, software roadmaps stay consistent

Drupal CMS - a web content management framework that provides a back-end framework serving at least 2.3% of all websites worldwide – ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites

Acquia Dev Studio - a robust set of tools for your editorial team and site builders right out of the box, so they can build Drupal 8 sites better and faster

Acquia Site Studio - an easy-to-learn Site Builder tool for creating websites in a front-end editor with no development skills required.

Acquia Cloud Platform - a secure, fast and scalable cloud hosting service tailor-made for Drupal to maximise its speed and scalability

Acquia Site Factory -  build, configure and manage many sites from one location

The complete set of digital marketing tools - from a personalisation platform, through a marketing automation solution, and on up to a machine learning solution for marketing data analysis.

A primary goal of your digital marketing is 1-on-1 communication personalisation. Your online meeting with potential clients should be treated similarly to a customer in your shop - 1-on-1 with your employee helping in a buy decision. This is the level of personalisation we aim for with the Marketing Cloud.

Acquia integrated one of the best marketing solutions under one hood:

Acquia Campaign Studio (Marketing Automation) - A solution to manage campaigns and measure user engagement - easily automate personalised communications across all your digital properties and channels (adding Maestro for large organisations to aggregate and manage - “orchestrate” - many Mautic instances).

Acquia Personalisation - A great way to quickly personalise each pixel of your website with pre-built content components that can be replaced based on your personalisation campaign criteria (no-code approach)

Acquia Customer Data Platform - Harness the power of your customer data with AI to understand, acquire, and engage with customers — bringing your Mautic and Lift campaigns to the next level with the use of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning

Acquia DAM (Digital Asset Management) - Your images, logos, videos, pdfs and more, all in one place and easy to update. Acquia DAM is a cloud-based digital asset management tool, backed by a central library for all of your Drupal sites.