Dries Buytaert

As is now a tradition for me, here is my annual Acquia retrospective, where I look back at 2014 and share what is on my mind as we start the new year. I take the time to write these retrospectives not only for you dear reader, but also for myself, because I want to keep a record of the changes we've gone through as a company and how my personal thinking is evolving from year to year. But I also write them for you, because you might be able to learn from my experiences or from analyzing the information provided. If you would like to, you can read my previous retrospectives: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013.

For Acquia, 2014 was another incredible year, one where we beat our wildest expectations. We crossed the major milestone of $100 USD million in annual revenue, the majority of which is recurring subscription revenue. It is hard to believe that 2014 was only our sixth full year as a revenue-generating business.

We've seen the most growth from our enterprise customers, but our number of small and medium size customers has grown too. We helped launch and host some incredible sites last year: from weather.com (a top 20 site) to the Emmys. Our efforts in Europe and Asia-Pacific are paying off; our EMEA business grew substantially, and the Australian government decided to switch the entire government to Drupal and the Acquia Platform.

We hired 233 people in 2014 and ended the year with 575 employees. About 25% of our employees work from home. The other 75% work from offices around the world; Burlington MA (US), Portland OR (US), Washington DC (US), Paris (France), Reading (United Kingdom), Ghent (Belgium), Singapore, Delhi (India), Brisbane (Australia) and Sydney (Australia). About 75% of our employees are based in the United States. Despite our fast growth rate in staff, recruiting remains a key challenge; it's hard to hire as fast as we do and maintain the high bar we've set for ourselves in terms of talent and commitment.

We raised venture funding twice in 2014: a $50MM series F round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) followed by Amazon investing an undisclosed amount of money in our business. It's not like Tom Erickson and I enjoy raising money, but building and expanding a sales and marketing team is notoriously difficult and requires big investments. At the same time, we're building and supporting the development of multiple products in parallel. Most companies only build one product. We're going after a big dream to become the preferred platform for what has been called the "pivot point of many enterprise tech stacks" — the technologies that permit organizations to deliver on the promises of exceptional digital customer experiences from an agile, open, resilient platform. We are also competing against behemoths. We can't show up to a gunfight with a knife, so to speak.

Building a digital platform for the enterprise

Digital has changed everything, and more and more organizations need or want to transform into digital-first businesses to stay in step with the preferences of their customers. Furthermore, technology innovations keep occurring at an ever faster and more disruptive pace. No organization is immune to the forces of digital disruption. At Acquia, we help our customers by providing a complete technology platform and the support necessary to support their digital initiatives. The Acquia Platform consists of tools and support for building and managing dynamic digital experiences. It includes Acquia Cloud, which helps developers deliver complex applications at scale, and Acquia Lift, our digital engagement services for bringing greater context to highly personalized experiences. Let me give you an update on each of the major components.

Drupal tools and support

Drupal gives organizations the ability to deliver a unified digital experience that includes mobile delivery, social and commerce. Great inefficiencies exist in most organizations that use a variety of different, disconnected systems to achieve those three essentials. They are tired of having to tie things together; content is important, social is important, commerce is important but connecting all these systems seamlessly and integrating them with preferred applications and legacy systems leads to massive inefficiencies. Companies want to do things well, and more often than not, Drupal allows them to do it better, more nimbly and in a far more integrated framework.

In 2010, we laid out our product vision and predicted more and more organizations would start to standardize on Drupal. Running 20 different content management systems on 20 different technology stacks is both an expensive and unnecessary burden. We've seen more and more large organizations re-platform most of their sites to Drupal and the Acquia Platform. They realize they don't need multiple content management systems for different sites. Great examples are Warner Music and Interscope Records, who have hundreds of sites on Drupal across the organization, resulting in significant cost savings and efficiency improvements. The success of our Acquia Cloud Site Factory solution has been gratifying to witness. According to a research study by Forrester Consulting, which we released late last year, ACSF is delivering a 944% return on investment to its adopters.

After many years of discussion and debate in the Drupal community, we launched the Acquia Certification Program in March 2014. So far, 546 Drupal developers from more than 45 countries have earned certification. The exams focus on real world experience, and the predominant comments we've heard this past year are that the exams are tough but fair. Acquia delivered six times the amount of training in 2014 compared to the previous year, and demand shows no sign of slowing.

Last, but definitely not least, is Drupal 8. We contributed significantly to Drupal 8 and helped it to achieve beta status; of the 513 critical Drupal 8 bugs fixed in 2014, Acquia's Office of the CTO helped fix 282 of them. We also funded work on the Drupal Module Upgrader to automate much of the work required to port modules from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.

Acquia Cloud

Drupal alone isn't enough for organizations to succeed in this digital-first world. In addition to adopting Drupal, the cloud continues to enable organizations to save time and money on infrastructure management so they can focus on managing websites more efficiently and bringing them to market faster. Acquia customers such as GRAMMY.com have come to depend on the Acquia Cloud to provide them with the kind of rugged, secure scale that ensures when the world's attention is focused on their sites, they will thrive. On a monthly basis, we're now serving more than 33 billion Apache hits, almost 5 billion Drupal bootstraps (requests handled by Drupal instead of one of different caching layers or the web server directly), 9 petabytes of data transferred (excluding instance to instance traffic), and logging 13 billion Drupal watchdog log lines. We added many new features to Acquia Cloud in 2014, including log streaming, self-service diagnosis tools, support for teams and permissions, two-factor authentication, new dashboards, improved security with support for Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), an API for Acquia Cloud, and more.

Acquia Lift

As powerful as the Drupal/Acquia Cloud combination may be, our customers demand far more from their digital properties, focusing more and more on optimizing them to fully deliver the best possible experience to each individual user. Great digital experiences have always been personal; today they have to become contextual, intuitively knowing each user and dynamically responding to each user's personal preference from device to location to history with the organization. After two years of development and the acquisition of TruCentric, we launched Acquia Lift in 2014.

It's surprising how many organizations aren't implementing any form of personalization today. Even the most basic level of user segmentation and targeting allows organizations to better serve their visitors and can translate into significant growth and competitive differentiation. Advanced organizations have a single, well-integrated view of the customer to optimize both the experience and the lifetime value of that customer, in a consistent fashion across all of their digital touchpoints. Personalization not only leads to better business results, customers have come to expect it and if they don't find it, they'll go elsewhere to get it. Acquia Lift enables organizations to leverage data from multiple sources in order to serve people with relevant content and commerce based on intent, locations and interests. I believe that Acquia Lift has tremendous opportunity and that it will grow to be a significant business in and of itself.

While our key areas of investment in 2014 were Acquia Cloud and Acquia Lift, we did a lot more. Our Mollom service blocked more than 7.8 billion spam messages with an error rate of only 0.01%. We continue to invest in commerce; we helped launch the new Puma website leveraging our Demandware connector and continue to invest and focus on the integration of content and commerce. Overall, the design and user experience of our products has improved a lot, but it is still an area for us to work on. Expect us to focus more heavily on user experience in 2015.

The results of all our efforts around the launch of the Acquia Platform have not gone unnoticed. In October, Acquia was identified as a Leader in the 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management.

The wind is blowing in the right direction

I'm very optimistic about Acquia's future in 2015. I believe we've steered the company to be positioned at the right place at the right time. As more organizations are shifting to becoming digital-first businesses they want to build digital experiences that are more pervasive, more contextual, more targeted, more integrated, and last but not least, more secure.

The consolidation from many individual point solutions to one platform is gaining momentum, although re-platforming is usually a long process. Organizations want the unified or integrated experience that Drupal has to offer, as well as the flexibility of Open Source. It is still time consuming and challenging to create quality content, and I believe there is plenty of opportunity for us and our partners to help with that going forward.

Without a doubt, organizations want to better understand their customers and use data-driven decisions to drive growth. Data is becoming the new product. The opportunity this creates in commerce is massive.

Cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) continues to be on the rise. Cloud is top of mind and the transition away from on-premise solutions is accelerating even as the arguments around security and privacy issues in the cloud continue to be raised. While there is a certain amount of emotion, and sometimes politics, people are beginning to realize that the cloud is usually more secure and more robust against cyber-attacks than traditional on-premise systems.

The promise of Drupal 8, arguably the most significant advance in the evolution of the Drupal software, has me very excited. It is shaping up to be a great release, and I'm confident it will further secure Drupal's reputation among developers, designers, agencies and site managers as the most flexible, powerful content management solution available.

All of this is not to say 2015 will be easy. This is an incredibly exciting and fast-changing space in the world of technology. Acquia is growing in an incredibly fast-paced, dynamic sector and we realize our mission is to help our customers understand how to think ahead to ever more innovation and change. Simplifying our overall messaging and defining ourselves around the Acquia Platform is a significant first step.

Of course, none of this success would be possible without the support of our customers, partners, the Drupal community, the Acquia team, and our many friends. Thank you for your support in 2014, and I look forward to working with you to find out what 2015 will bring!