Acquia CMO on Record Year of Growth & Company Highlights

By Gabriella Pirrone

February 12, 2019

Acquia, Acquia Engage, customer experience, CX, Digital Experience, Dries Buytaert, Drupal, Elastic Path, Forrester, gartner, Growth Strategy, open source, WCM

It was an exciting 2018 for Acquia. From being named a challenger in the Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, having a fifth consecutive appearance in the Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management 2018, partnering with headless commerce solution, Elastic Path, to being named an influential system in the Forrester Wave: Web Content Management Systems, Q4 2018, this was just the icing on the cake that added to the company's record year of rapid growth.

Just before 2017 came to a close, former Hewlett Packard Veteran, Michael Sullivan, also joined Acquia as their Chief Executive Officer, and capped off his first year with a huge financial growth for the company. Dries Buytaert, Co-founder, CTO, and Chairman of the Board at Acquia mentioned some of those highlights in a personal blog post at the end of January.

Here are some of Acquia’s highlights from 2018 that were mentioned in their press release:

• New bookings for Acquia’s digital experience solutions grew 57 percent

• Channel-partner new bookings grew 52 percent

• EMEA-based new bookings grew 103 percent

• Gross profit grew 39 percent

• Adjusted EBITDA⁽¹⁾ grew 78 percent

• Free cash flow grew 84 percent

To hear more about their accomplishments, and how Acquia achieved such great success in 2018, I was lucky enough to connect with Lynne Capozzi, CMO of Acquia, in an exclusive CMSC Media interview. Follow along below!

“Demand for the Acquia Experience Platform helped us surpass $200 million in revenue. We’ve also added hundreds of new customers, including more than 325 enterprise customers since the beginning of 2018. Throughout 2018, Acquia unveiled more than 50 new capabilities to the Acquia Experience Platform, all of which were designed to deliver greater operational efficiency, improved agility to drive customer engagement, and faster time to delivery. We also grew our R&D team by 45 percent in 2018 to accelerate the development of marketing and digital experience applications, and opened Acquia’s newest European headquarters in central Reading, UK.”, said Lynne. She added:
 
“We brought our marquee customer conference Acquia Engage to three continents in 2018, connecting our team with customers, partners, and prospects. These events serve as a forum to share ideas, address digital challenges, and learn from one another so we can better serve the digital experience community at large. We also deepened our commitment to really understanding marketer and consumer pain points this year, launching our first ever Closing the CX Gap report, which provided a global perspective from marketers and consumers on what makes or breaks customer experience. Acquia is committed to listening to what consumers and marketers really need, and doing our part to close that gap, and we believe that this commitment has contributed to our success.”
 

The Shift to Open Source Adoption

Open source adoption is continuing to grow as more and more marketers look to open source to solve customer experiences when it comes to consumers being unfulfilled, and expectations not being met. Throughout 2018, Acquia unveiled more than 50 new capabilities to the Acquia Experience Platform, all of which were designed to deliver greater operational efficiency, improved agility to drive customer engagement, and faster time to delivery.

Because of this, I asked Lynne why organizations are choosing to go the open source adoption route. “Open source technology is a powerful asset to marketers as it allows them to easily integrate with third party innovations. Our recent research showed that one of marketers’ biggest pain points is integrating their MarTech stack, and open source solves this problem. As innovation in the Marketing Technology space continues to grow at a rapid pace, open source technology allows marketers to harness the collective brain power of the larger MarTech ecosystem and give their customers the best of everything. Open source also allows marketers to truly capture all of their data to create a more comprehensive picture of their customer” said Lynne.
 
Providing simplicity without compromising flexibility is what gives Acquia customers the freedom to build on their own terms, so I asked Lynne why Acquia stands out above the rest and what makes Drupal so appealing. “Acquia is built around Drupal, which gives users the ability to build, operate, and optimize websites, apps, and other digital experiences easily. Often, marketers are forced to sacrifice flexibility when they need to perform at scale. Acquia stands out because we provide technology that is both easy to build and to scale. We also offer easy integration with third party apps so that our customers are not locked in to one platform, and have the flexibility to integrate with the best-of-breed solutions that work best for their customers.”  

Ending Notes

Not only was Acquia ranked one of the top 20 best places to work by BuiltInBoston, their industry recognition and regional expansions—like their new European headquarters in Reading, U.K.—is just one of Acquia's markets generating huge success. Acquia has also opened up their new sales operations in Latin America, Japan, and Singapore.

“Employee feedback is our single most important barometer for gauging our workplace culture, and we are committed to leading the industry in building a diverse workforce and creating opportunities for growth and leadership for all Acquians,” said Heather Hartford, CPO at Acquia.

As we look toward 2019, the amount of technology and innovation that is increasingly gaining momentum is instrumental in the industry. I asked Lynne what Acquia’s roadmap looks like as we enter 2019: “Entering 2019, we are more confident than ever that an open, API-centric experience platform is the future of this market. As a company, we expect that major acquisitions of open source companies in 2018 will open doors for open source by making users more comfortable with the concept. Ultimately, we anticipate that this will be good for our business. We have exciting product innovations coming up in 2019 across our platform, and with our newly intensified investment in R&D, customers can expect to see major updates to our offerings that will make them more powerful than ever.”, says Lynne.

Also, be sure to mark your calendars for Acquia Engage Asia Pacific, taking place March 7th, 2019 in Melbourne, Australia, and Acquia Engage Europe taking place June 17-18 2019 in London, England!
 

Gabriella Pirrone

Gabriella is the Digital Marketing Assistant for CMSC Media. She brings a wealth of knowledge from not only a CMS perspective but also content, SEO and eCommerce. She enjoys everything social media and staying ontop of the latest trends in the digital marketing world.