10/01/2019

Daily Buzz: Drupal’s Big Buyout

The acquisition is a big deal

There was just a big purchase in the world of content management, and there’s a lot to watch out for. As TechCrunch reported last week, the private equity firm Vista Equity Partners acquired Acquia, an enterprise services and content management shop, for $1 billion.

You might be curious why the acquisition is such a big deal, and the answer is that Acquia is to the content management platform Drupal as Automattic is to WordPress. It’s a big shake-up that promises to affect the shape of the content management space in the coming years.

In an interview, Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, who serves as Acquia’s chief technical officer, pledged that the company would maintain its mission to keep growing Drupal and another product Acquia recently acquired, the marketing automation firm Mautic.

“We were born out of open source. All of our customers use open source. We give back to open source. It’s part of our DNA. It’s what we do,” Buytaert told TechCrunch. “And, so making sure that any new investor understood that and was aligned with [it] was critically important, and Vista is very excited about the open-source community around Drupal and Mautic (two open-source projects Acquia is the steward of), and has even agreed to invest more in them.”

Nonetheless, CMSWire notes that there is a potential for turbulence for Drupal, in part because one of Vista Equity Partners’ prior acquisitions, Marketo, was sold off within two years. So, if you’re a Drupal shop—and many associations are—there’s much to keep an eye on.

Please select this link to read the original article from Associations Now.