Acquia Customers Discuss Drupal, Best of Breed & More

By Gabriella Pirrone

January 2, 2019

Acquia, B2B, B2C, Best of Breed, Centrica, CRM, Digital Experience, Drupal, IBM, Integration, open source, Pegasystems, Salesforce

This year at Acquia Engage 2018, we had the chance to speak with several customers who utilize the Acquia platform for their digital experiences. Watch our first two exclusive customer interviews below that were captured directly from the event where we discuss the Drupal based open source platform, best-of-breed, and the complications that you can run into when moving and consolidating your websites over to a new platform.

Derek Gilmore, Senior Director of Web Architecture at Pegasystems

Pegasystems is a CRM and VPN vendor that powers the back office for many fortune 500 companies and as Derek mentions, is the “best kept secret in enterprise software”. Unifying sales and marketing is a topic we often discuss here at CMSC Media but with Derek’s expertise in web architecture, we were curious to hear his thoughts on the more technical side of that relationship and using Drupal 8.

“We’re using our own technology to collect leads from the website and pass those off to our sales people within their CRM system. We use our Drupal technology stack and our CRM stack internally to basically support the efforts of the sales and marketing team so we work very closely with the CMO and the VP of marketing to make sure that we’re delivering a world-class marketing experience to our internal stakeholders.”

CEO of Acquia, Mike Sullivan, had a great keynote on opening day of the event and discussed some common criticisms in the world of open source. So we were curious to hear Derek’s thoughts on the topic. “I’m in Mike’s camp in terms of his thinking about open sources transparency and also the fact that numerous government agencies and large corporations are using Drupal, that's the fact that it in of itself creates almost a security ecosystem and it actually forces Drupal to be more secure than other solutions that are out there because people know what the Drupal technology is, they know what the code looks like so there has to be an open approach to security and Acquia as a company has in my opinion provided us with the level of comfort and confidence within the security stack.”

Our last question for Mike was around Acquia’s focus on their best of breed approach and how he’s found success in that approach using a third party integrator. “All these integrators have deep expertise in Drupal. There’s a lot at stake in our website in terms of the complexity and the ambitious experiences we’re trying to create and we really need to have a partner that can stand behind us and make sure that we can successfully deliver those experiences.”

Mike Bossard, Global Digital Platform Specialist at Centrica

Centrica Business Solutions provides organizations with innovative and end-to-end energy solutions to enable the improvement of operational efficiency to drive business forward. As an Acquia customer, Centrica had to launch their brand from scratch so we wanted to ask Mike what some of the other unique challenges were that they faced during the launch. “We had to focus on launching the brand very quickly and now we have nine regions that we’re in and supporting 5 languages and we’re putting out tons of content so we had to have a vehicle for that so we figured the best solution for us was to have a platform where we could spin up sites very quickly, be able to have brand governance and make sure it was a good experience for our customers.”

At the event, Centrica was named the winner of the “2018 Acquia Engage Awards for Excellence in Digital Marketing B2B” which was also won alongside their partner IBM iX. So we asked Mike his thoughts on their amazing accomplishment and how they achieved that. “The reason why I think we won was because of us partnering with a partner like them and they had the expertise to help us out with the design aspect of it, with the development aspect of it, Drupal, and also the expertise to help launch at full capacity in Salesforce.”

.@CentricaSoln_NA wins 2018 #AcquiaEngage for #B2B Digital Marketing https://t.co/5m1wqihJpV pic.twitter.com/29DiSshGLC

— Alle Houstoun (@AlleHoustoun) November 9, 2018

With that said, we asked Mike what the process was for bringing elements of the B2C experience into B2B. “When I think of B2C I think of very engaging content, lots of content and not stale. We didn’t want to come out with a brand that was like every other energy solutions provider, we wanted to be edgy, we wanted to be the future of energy solutions so taking that spin we made sure that the design was really spot on and engaging right out the gate.”

Our last question for Mike was on their platform consolidation process, so we wanted to know what complications they ran into when they moved their site over to the Acquia platform. “Taking all that content and consolidating it into our site and our CRM Salesforce and we had help from great partners like IBM iX.”

Ending Notes

We always enjoy speaking with customers at events because it gives us a clear understanding how the companies utilize the platform such as Acquia to share their successes and triumphs. As Derek mentions in his interview above “we can go to sleep at night knowing that we’ve got a solid solution in a partner to make sure our infrastructure is secure.”

Besides these two customer interviews, we gathered a few more from this event so make sure you check back for those coming soon!
 

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.