Today we're proud to announce that the team at Rapid Waters Development will be joining Lullabot. Jerad Bitner and David Burns founded Rapid Waters, a Drupal-focused development company, in 2009 after years of development experience with Sony Music, MothersClick, and Lifetime Television. Rapid Waters recently helped Lullabot launch IgniteShow.com for O'Reilly Media.

Since we began in 2006, Lullabot has been as a small consulting and education company focused on high-level technical planning and architecture, developer training and mentorship, and server performance tuning. As Lullabot takes on more projects like Buzzr and the thriving Lullabot Store, we find ourselves doing more development on both client and Lullabot internal projects.

This acquisition marks the beginning of a new development division at Lullabot. These new dedicated development resources will allow us to provide more complete Drupal solutions. We're still a small company concentrating on high-end projects, and our focus will continue as a consulting and education company, however now we're able offer better hand-in-hand development resources for our clients.

Lullabot is proud to announce that GRAMMY.com, the official site of the GRAMMY Awards, is now a Drupal site. The GRAMMY Awards is the music business' largest and most prestigious awards ceremony. This year's telecast, happening January 31st, will be the 52nd annual awards ceremony held by the The Recording Academy.

GRAMMY.com has run on several platforms over the years, but The Recording Academy decided to move to Drupal for its flexibility, speedy build-out, scalability, and performance under pressure. The website sees a huge traffic spike around the telecast and the Academy needed a content management system which could be both resource efficient throughout the year and provide high-performance and high-availability around the dates of the awards ceremony.

Lullabot, whose portfolio includes Lifetime Television, FastCompany.com, and the Sony Music artist platform (running over 100 Sony artist websites), brought in developers from Santex to help get the site built in about eight weeks. The site features extensive photo and video galleries, a live video feed, blogs and news, and of course listings of all the nominees. The site also features integration with Twitter and the GRAMMYs' active Facebook community. The project was assembled using mostly existing free add-on modules from Drupal's vast contributions repository.

In the past, a website like this would have cost millions of dollars to build. But Drupal allowed The Recording Academy to assemble the site quickly at a fraction of the cost.