Acquia Launches: Supported Drupal Social Publishing

Today is the official launch of Acquia, a commercial company dedicated to supporting Drupal, the social publishing system.

Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal (who some say is to Drupal as Linus Torvalds is to Linux) joined forces with Acquia in order to realize the vision he had — and the one the community and ecosystem is striving for — with Drupal. Buytaert had this to say this morning about the services they’ll be offering:

The Acquia Network (previously code-named Spokes) is a hosted service that helps you with site management (update notifications, spam blocking, cron service, modification detection, etc) and provides real-time visibility into the health and usage of all your Drupal sites that are connected to the Acquia Network.

Second, the Acquia Network gives you access to Acquia’s technical support team. Whether it is an installation question, a development question or a configuration question, our Drupal experts are ready to provide you with technical support. The kicker? Acquia Network subscriptions are available for every budget — including a free community version. Give it a try!

Third, we are also releasing Acquia Drupal today. Acquia Drupal (previously code-named Carbon) is our Drupal distribution that bundles some of the best, most essential Drupal modules for building social publishing sites. Acquia Drupal is available for free, and all our bug fixes and improvements go straight to the module maintainers on drupal.org. Acquia Drupal defines the collection of modules that you can get technical support for.

I’m installing this distro right now and will be comparing it to Acquia’s promise of a Drupal system that has the fit-n-finish power users demand, pre-configuration to jumpstart a deployment, theming that goes beyond the typical fugly Drupal themes, all in an attempt to accelerate adoption and support us all so we’re successful with a powerful publishing system (and platform) like this one.