Acquia Unveils Comprehensive OpenWEM to Help Digital Marketers Create Amazing Digital Experiences on the Open Web

BURLINGTON, MA--(Marketwire - Oct 25, 2012) - Acquia, the enterprise guide to Drupal, today unveiled Open Web Experience Management (OpenWEM™), which empowers organizations to create immersive, digital content and campaigns, socialize them across multiple communities and channels, and deliver the ultimate shopping experience -- while leveraging the flexibility of the Open Web. Supporting the OpenWEM announcement, Acquia also released a significant update of its social business platform, Drupal Commons 3.0 for Drupal 7, and launched Acquia Media Cloud™ (beta), the first rich media collaboration and storage system designed specifically for Drupal.

OpenWEM is based on Drupal's proven web content management platform. Drupal's modular components increase IT agility and significantly decrease development and maintenance costs. The passionate, global Drupal community -- comprised of nearly 890,000 people in 228 countries speaking 181 languages -- generates a 24/7 stream of innovative new features that are easily snapped into any Drupal deployment, future-proofing an organization's OpenWEM investment.

Exploiting the concepts of the Open Web, Drupal modules exist to easily integrate into virtually all of the other components of the digital marketer's arsenal -- from marketing automation to social analytics -- including Marketo, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Exact Target, Facebook and hundreds more. Additionally, the Acquia App Marketplace offers compelling SaaS tools for digital marketers to utilize, including A/B testing, gamification and faceted search.

With OpenWEM, marketers have unmatched flexibility to quickly optimize the mix of content, community and commerce on their sites and convert prospects into loyal, engaged customers. The combination of Acquia, Drupal and Acquia's App Marketplace give marketers an agile platform to create multi-channel digital experiences that cover the full spectrum of their customer's journey.

"Acquia's OpenWEM offers digital marketers and IT organizations a much better alternative to proprietary WEM solutions that are slow to adapt to changing business needs and keep pace with the speed of the social web," said Tom Erickson, CEO of Acquia. "Our open approach sets a new standard for WEM by giving organizations the right tools and solutions they need to create engaging web experiences for their audiences, available either on premise or using Acquia's proven elastic cloud environment."

New Tools to Support OpenWEM

Building on the success of its widely recognized and award-winning solutions, Acquia released several critical new products and tools that support OpenWEM, including:

• Drupal Commons 3.0 for Drupal 7 (beta) - Enables organizations to quickly create online social communities for both collaboration and content delivery. New features in Version 3.0 include a completely rebuilt user experience, deeper mobile support, and bolstered analytics capabilities for enhanced moderator productivity.
  
  
• Media Cloud (beta) - New media management service allows marketers to manage and share rich media assets natively within Drupal to accelerate time to market on new campaigns and microsites.
  
  
• Badgeville - Enables marketers to add engagement mechanics to their Drupal-powered websites, which drives participation and rewards user behaviors such as starting discussion forums, blog posts, and commenting on other content.
  

"We've received tremendous interest in Badgeville for Drupal from marketers who want to create a deeper, more engaging experience for their customers and reward them for contributing to that experience," said Kris Duggan, CEO of Badgeville. "We're extremely pleased that we are being offered as a key component of Acquia's OpenWEM to provide engagement metrics capabilities for its users."

Ensuring Customer Success Through a Broad Agency/Developer Ecosystem

Acquia has also assembled a partner ecosystem comprised of more than 400 leading digital agencies and developers. Digital agencies like Digitaria, Digital Bungalow, VML, and ProPeople see the value of implementing a WEM solution on Drupal, which enables them to choose best-in-class tools and solutions for their clients' campaigns -- versus a closed, proprietary solution that only supports approved vendors and limits multi-channel capabilities. 

To make it even easier for digital agencies to embrace OpenWEM, Acquia is integrating APIs for the top Drupal development tools used most frequently by Acquia customers. In June 2012, Digital Bungalow helped Humana adopt an OpenWEM strategy for their strategic site, mywell-being.com, offering personalization, deep connections to enterprise marketing tools, such as Adobe SiteCatalyst, and responsive web design (rWd) for mobile experiences.

"Many Digitaria customers require a best-of-breed approach to building a broad digital marketing system of engagement, which means any technologies we use have to be interoperable," said Chuck Philips, the agency's award-winning CTO. "Drupal offers the modularity and flexibility we need, plus an unparalleled developer community that reduces our risk and accelerates innovation. Acquia's solutions are the glue that binds Drupal to our customers' digital marketing strategies and vision. We look forward to working closely with them to help our customers achieve success."

Martin Coady, Director of Technical Strategy & Partnerships at VML, adds, "VML takes a holistic approach to WEM, where business objectives and digital strategies drive the decision to deploy specific technologies and platforms -- not vendor limitations or mandates. In this context, Drupal is one the best platforms for bringing this all together." He continues, "Because it is open source-based, Acquia's OpenWEM lets us easily leverage our clients' existing technologies and use Drupal's ecosystem of modules to create integrations and fill in functional gaps. In this way, VML is able to develop compelling digital experiences that meet our client's objectives."

"Acquia and the Drupal platform are helping us create amazing digital experiences that convert visitors to customers, connect customers to brands, and capture valuable insights that let brands create even more meaningful experiences," said Michael Drejer, Global CEO, Propeople. "We're excited to be partnering with a company like Acquia who understands that, for digital agencies, technology should be an enabler rather than a barrier. We appreciate Acquia's OpenWEM approach, as it lets us use the tools we need to build the kind of experiences our clients expect."

About Acquia™, the enterprise guide to Drupal
Acquia empowers enterprises with the open source social publishing system Drupal. Co-founded by Drupal's creator in 2007, Acquia helps customers manage their growth and scale their online properties with confidence. Acquia's products, cloud infrastructure, and support enable companies to realize the full power of Drupal while minimizing risk, as it's done for more than 2,400 enterprise customers including Twitter, Warner Music Group, Turner Sports, World Economic Forum, Stanford University, Mercedes-Benz and NPR. Acquia was recently named the number one software company in the 2012 Inc. 500 survey of the fastest growing private companies. Acquia has also been named one of the 100 most promising companies in America by Forbes Magazine. See who's using Drupal at http://www.drupalshowcase.com, and for more information please visit www.acquia.com or call 888-9-ACQUIA.

OpenWEM and Acquia Media Cloud are trademarks of Acquia, Inc.