Tom Erickson on Acquia and Growing the Drupal Ecosystem

Tom Erickson is the CEO of Acquia and he talks about the different products and divisions of Acquia, including about how many different people work in each division. He talks about some of the challenges of scaling a company, which mostly include finding good Drupal talent and helping to spread the awareness of Drupal. Acquia also recently had a Series C round of funding, which helped to expand their sales and marketing team to be a full one quarter of their company. In fact, Erickson describes Acquia's biggest strength as being a sales, marketing and support company that is really trying to grow the Drupal ecosystem.

Erickson talks about some of the biggest misconceptions that people may have about Acquia, and explains who they are and what they're trying to accomplish. Ultimately, Acquia wants to see the Drupal ecosystem grow and become stronger, and they're doing a lot of things behind the scenes in order to help educate business analysts about Drupal so that it can be better positioned in reports that evaluate different content management system options.

In my interview with Dries this year, he came out as a self-professed data geek and Erickson talks about some of the many hundreds of different metrics that Acquia is tracking -- including some of the specific metrics that they are the most proud of. Finally, Erickson talks about what has surprised him the most about working in the Drupal community, and it's definitely how explosive of a growth curve Drupal has been going through over the last couple of years since starting with Acquia.