Dries Buytaert

Today Acquia announces the WPP-Acquia Alliance, a global partnership with the world's largest communications services company. This isn't just a milestone for Acquia — I believe it to be significant for the Drupal community as well so let me tell you a bit more about it.

WPP is a marketing company. A very, very large marketing company. With more than 188,000 people in 112 countries, WPP's billings are nearly $76 billion USD and its revenues approach $19 billion USD.

The reason that the WPP-Acquia Alliance is interesting for Drupal, is because WPP's primary client is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). The influence of the CMO has been on the rise; their responsibility has evolved from "the one responsible for advertising" to having a critical role in designing the customer experience across all the customer touchpoints (including the websites). The CMO often has a deep understanding of how to use technology to deliver an integrated, system-wide customer experience. This is one of Drupal's strengths, and bringing organizations like WPP into the Drupal fold will help bring Drupal into the office of the CMO, grow the adoption of Drupal, and expands the opportunity for everyone in our community. If you believe, as I do, that the CMO is important, then I can't think of a better company to work with than WPP.

WPP will connect its Drupal developers from several agencies under one umbrella, creating a Drupal center of excellence, and the world's largest Acquia-certified Drupal practice. Globant, Hogarth, Mirum, Possible, Rockfish, VML and Wunderman are some of the agencies who'll be contributing to the WPP-Acquia Alliance, and building innovative Drupal applications for global clients. Acquia will provide WPP its open cloud platform, solutions for multi-site management, personalization tools, and more.