Acquia is one of the leading open-source digital experience platforms available out there. It is an ever-evolving engine that builds great products and solutions leveraging Drupal. So how are Acquia and Drupal related? What does Acquia have to offer Drupal and customers of Drupal? How can Acquia/its products help you in your digital transformation journey? We try to answer these questions in this article albeit at a 10,000-feet level to give you a quick snapshot of the Acquia world.
The History and Relationship
Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal – the open source CMS framework, founded Acquia, a cloud-based digital experience company in 2007 built around Drupal to provide cloud infrastructure, support, services, products and solutions for enterprise organizations. The vision was to help Drupal scale, to promote open source software, to empower the Drupal community and increase Drupal adoption across the globe.
Acquia, as an organization, initially offered cloud infrastructure services for Drupal websites however, it eventually evolved into a full-blown digital experience platform (DXP) with an array of products built around Drupal. Acquia, as a DXP, continues to innovate/build new products and solutions for customers using Drupal. In addition to this, Dries continues to lead the Drupal project. Acquia’s Drupal team continues to be the biggest driver/contributor to Drupal open source community evolving the CMS to the latest and greatest of this fast-paced digital world.
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
With Acquia’s vision to evolve Drupal into an enterprise-grade CMS, the organization started building a slew of tightly-knit complementary products and solutions that eventually made Acquia an enterprise digital experience platform. Acquia products are built to cater to two types of audiences – technical and marketing. Below snapshot gives a quick overview of the same.
Acquia DXP allows enterprises to build highly scalable digital experiences that allows them to seamlessly interact with their end consumers. The entire DXP is built with an API-first approach. So, a customer can customize their specific DXP by picking and choosing product that makes most sense to their business use cases.
Let us explore the various Acquia products in a little more detail.
Experience Factory
This category of products is mainly focused on making developers’ life easy and powerful by giving them tools which will allow them to plan, build and operate Drupal websites seamlessly.
Acquia Cloud
Acquia Cloud is a cloud-based infrastructure that enables hosting and maintaining Drupal websites of varying complexities with ease. It is kubernetes-native platform that allows for automatic scaling depending on the needs of the website. The easy-to-use drag and drop interface with development, staging and production environments makes code and database maintenance very simple for developers.
Various built-in performance layers – varnish, memcache, PHP and Drupal makes Drupal websites hosted on Acquia cloud load in a jiffy. Built-in CDN enables faster content delivery depending on where the website is accessed from. The cloud platform guarantees 99.99% uptime. New Relic performance monitoring tool helps users to monitor, dig into and address any performance concerns promptly.
From a security standpoint, the platform provides features like multi-factor authentication, role-based access controls, SSH IP access controls, federated authentication etc. that makes Drupal websites highly secure.
Acquia Site Factory
Acquia Site Factory allows users to build and maintain large number of Drupal websites through a centralized dashboard. It allows for maintaining existing websites and building new ones with faster turnaround time. Cloning a new website from an existing one and quickly launching the new website helps bring down time to market drastically. A centralized governance approach enables providing roles and permissions for the site managers/team members depending on what is essential to them. Custom dashboards can be built to view all websites or a subset of them through a centralized view. Drupal updates leveraging site factory makes pushing updates to a large number of website very quick and easy. Single sign on features enables a user to sign in across all the Drupal website in the site factory platform which in turn helps reduce the number of user account and passwords to maintain in a large cluster of websites.
Acquia CMS
Acquia CMS is a pre-packaged version of Drupal that is configured, built and maintained by Acquia. The CMS is built after evaluating more than 45,000 modules from the Drupal community and configured in such a way that makes it an enterprise-grade CMS. Acquia CMS is designed to natively integrate with all of the other Acquia products particularly the Acquia Marketing cloud. It also caters to different types of users – marketers-focused (low code), developer-focused (high code), or hybrid – depending on the business’ needs. The intuitive interfaces allows marketers to build pages quickly and with no/low reliance on developers. Lot of pre-built components can be leveraged to build pages. Custom components can be created and added to the component library for future use thus making the platform truly reusable-first. Built-in responsive design helps components/pages to seamless present themselves across digital channels. The CMS also support more than 100 languages. Extending Acquia CMS to integrate with any systems/platforms is seamless as it is API-first.
Acquia Developer Tools
Acquia Developer tools helps developers quickly and seamlessly build Drupal websites. For creation, tools like Acquia Cloud IDE, Acquia Command Line Interface (CLI), Acquia Lightning (Drupal distribution for enterprise authoring) can all be used. For building automated workflows, Acquia Pipelines, Cloud API, Cloud hooks can be leveraged.
Acquia Edge
Edge WAF and CDN are cloud-based solutions that accelerates application delivery and ensure availability at a very high performance and security. Edge CDN caches content across 200+ global endpoints enabling faster performance irrespective of user’s location. DDOS protection and preemptive threat mitigation are built-in aspects of Edge WAF.
Acquia Migrate Accelerate
With Drupal 7 reaching end of life by November 2022 and Drupal 8 already reaching end of life by November 2021, migrating from Drupal 7 to 9 could be tricky. There are still a whole of website running on Drupal 7 . Migrate Accelerate is a tool that helps accelerate Drupal 7 to 9 migration by up to 80% using an intuitive UI and a comprehensive migration setup built by Acquia.
Acquia Site Studio
This is Acquia’s low-code tool that enables marketers build Drupal websites quickly leveraging highly intuitive, component-based website builder. Building new page, modifying existing ones and previewing them before launch are all pretty straight forward with no/less dependence on developers. More than 70 prebuilt components and page templates can be leveraged to build/modify pages. Custom components can be created and added to the component library for future use. Roles and permissions are available at component-level, page-level or sub-page level.
Acquia Content Hub
This tool enables discovering and syndicating contents across channels, teams and geographies seamless. Content Hub API can be leveraged to integrate with external systems. Content delivery, content aggregation, content syndication and content discovery are all features that are built into this tool.
Marketing Hub
This category of products is mainly focused on marketers to give them powerful solutions which in turn will help them achieve their marketing objectives seamlessly.
Acquia Customer Data Platform (CDP)
The Acquia CDP allows business to unify customer data across touch points to generate powerful insights that can in turn enable specific, targeted and personalized marketing to its end users. A 360-degree view of customer can be obtained which will provide customer-facing teams with real-time insights. Through these insights and the pre-built configurable attributes, advanced customer segments and multi-channel journeys can be created to deliver highly personalized campaigns. Reporting and analysis can be easily done with lot of out-of-the-box reports and no technical expertise required. Built-in machine learning and predictive models – likelihood models, clusters, recommendations helps business understand and target their end customers better. GDPR compliance, CCPA compliance, HIPAA compliance are all ensured by the platform.
Acquia Personalization
Combining with Acquia CDP, this tool ensures businesses can design and build unique experiences depending on individual customer behaviours. The tool is highly intuitive with an easy-to-use no-code interface. Powerful personalization strategies can be built by A/B testing and refining experiences in real-time. Multi-channel targetting can be seamlessly by understanding customer behaviour across touchpoints.
Acquia Campaign Studio
This tools enables businesses to build campaigns across multiple channels thus engaging with its customers at the right time. Designing, automating, optimizing and personalizing campaigns along the way in customer’s journey can all be seamlessly handled from this tool. Audiences can be quickly segmented into segments based on behaviors. Leads can be scored based on their engagement with the business. Native integration with existing platforms – CRM, CDP is possible. Journey builder helps building powerful workflows that help delivering personalized moments to customers.
Acquia Digital Asset Management (DAM)
A centralized cloud-based solution that makes managing complex digital assets very simple. All types of assets can be organized, previewed and maintained in this tool. Permissioning can be done at various level – individual, department, organization etc. Powerful faceted search allows finding assets very easy. Tracking multiple versions of file iterations is simple. Customized automated workflows can be built for workflow management.
Acquia Product Information Management (PIM)
This tool enables organizing, searching and distributing products across digital experiences/channels very seamless. Similar to DAM, permissions, faceted search, iterations, automated workflows are all built-in aspects of this tool.
With Acquia’s continuing innovation leveraging Drupal more relevant products keep getting added to the Acquia’s product suite. While not all products might be relevant to every business, organizations need to understand the changing dynamics of the digital world and adapt themselves accordingly by assessing their digital stack and bringing in the right tools at the right time to effectively engage with their end users.
Workiy is an Acquia Partner who has delivered various projects leveraging Acquia Products and Drupal. If you are interested to learn more about any of the Acquia products or considering integrating them into your digital stack, we are here to help you.
Feel free to reach us at info@workiy.com or +1 (778) 798-0252 with any of your product queries. We are excited and looking forward to support you in your Acquia/Drupal journey!
