In March this year, I mentioned about Acquia’s Enterprise Drupal distribution in this blog. Now, seven months pass and Acquia is ready for its commercial Drupal product/service.

What Acquia offers us?

• Acquia Drupal - Acquia’s enterprise Drupal distribution. It is Drupal plus several contributed modules plus Acquia Network integration module.
• Acquia Network - Subscription plan for various Drupal enhancement services (e.g. spam blocking, update notification)
• Support and customization service - as usual

It is easier to explain Acquia’s business model using Red Hat analogy:

• Drupal = Fedora; standard general distribution for everyone
• Acquia Drupal = RHEL; comprehensive distribution for some people
• Acquia Network = RHN; subscription service in compliment with RHEL

Drupal is open source, Acquia Drupal is also open source. Everyone can download them for free and has freedom to tweak them like all other GPL software. However, Acquia Network is not free (that’s how they make money), like RHN. Fortunately, Acquia is a startup company and they have free trial period for Acquia Network that everyone can try.

No matter that I met Dries in Brussels (and got his signature for my colleague.) He begins the startup, Acquia, which aims to be Red Hat for Drupal. Now their business plans are announced. As expected, Acquia lists some modules and will commercially support them.

This is the first step of Drupal for the enterprise world. I then wonder of the selections and want to know Acquia’s opinion on choosing the modules. Fortunately, It’s available at this page (login needed.)