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Drupal Voices 179: Tom Erickson on Acquia and Growing the Drupal Ecosystem

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Tom Erickson is the CEO of Acquia and he talks about the different products and divisions of Acquia, including about how many different people work in each division. He talks about some of the challenges of scaling a company, which mostly include finding good Drupal talent and helping to spread the awareness of Drupal. Acquia also recently had a Series C round of funding, which helped to expand their sales and marketing team to be a full one quarter of their company. In fact, Erickson describes Acquia's biggest strength as being a sales, marketing and support company that is really trying to grow the Drupal ecosystem.

Erickson talks about some of the biggest misconceptions that people may have about Acquia, and explains who they are and what they're trying to accomplish. Ultimately, Acquia wants to see the Drupal ecosystem grow and become stronger, and they're doing a lot of things behind the scenes in order to help educate business analysts about Drupal so that it can be better positioned in reports that evaluate different content management system options.

In my interview with Dries this year, he came out as a self-professed data geek and Erickson talks about some of the many hundreds of different metrics that Acquia is tracking -- including some of the specific metrics that they are the most proud of. Finally, Erickson talks about what has surprised him the most about working in the Drupal community, and it's definitely how explosive of a growth curve Drupal has been going through over the last couple of years since starting with Acquia.

April 18, 2011 - 9:00am
Drupal Voices
19:26 minutes (17.84 MB)
mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

Comments

Hi I find the Drupal Voices

Hi

I find the Drupal Voices podcasts very interesting but I just have a comment for the interviewer. The interviewer always ends the podcast off with an uninteresting "okay well great thanks" or a derivative thereof. It's as if in the last 10 seconds of every podcast there is a massive steep cliff. I wouldn't be surprised if the last words were accompanied with a "brush off" hand gesture.

Location/time factors in here

Most of the Drupal Voices podcasts are conducted at DrupalCon when Kent (the interviewer) can pin down particular individuals he's looking to interview. Due to the amount of things going on at any given time at DrupalCon, interviewees usually don't have much time to give so Kent tries to focus on the most pressing questions and cuts out a lot of intro/outro in the actual interview. So it's not really a "brush-off" its probably more that the interviewee has to run off to some talk, birds of a feather, meeting, lunch, mixer, etc. Not to mention Kent has to track down and interview 60+ people over the course of 3 days, so there's challenge on his part too.