On the Move

Acquia has announced the appointment of Christopher Stone as senior vice president of products and development. Stone has more than 30 years of experience in software development and pioneering open source solutions for the enterprise. Stone will be responsible for engineering, DevOps, and product management of the Acquia Platform, helping lead the expansion of the company’s suite of SaaS solutions for building and managing integrated digital experiences.

One of my favorite local companies, Blend Interactive, recently made some news this past week. Blend Interactive has named Karla Santi as their Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Santi has been a partner at Blend Interactive since the company formed in 2005, where, to the public, she served as Creative Director and, behind the scenes, handled a good chunk of operational oversight.

Blend Interactive is a web design, development, and strategy firm located in Sioux Falls, SD. Blend Interactive specializes in custom design, strategy and development for web and mobile, and is responsible for the annual Now What? Conference.

AUSTIN, TEXAS – June 3, 2014 – Acquia, the digital business company, today strengthens its offerings for big data marketing and commerce, signing a definitive agreement to acquire Toronto-based TruCentric and its SaaS solution for real-time customer profiling and user engagement. TruCentric uses situational and historical data to drive deeper understanding of site visitors and provides insight in a way that marketers can make use of it.

Digital Business Optimization Drives Growth for America’s Fastest Growing Private Software Company

Creative Commons announced this week the appointment of Ryan Merkley to the position of chief executive officer. Ryan was recently chief operating officer of the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit parent of the Mozilla Corporation and creator of the world’s most recognizable open-source software project and internet browser, Firefox. At the Mozilla Foundation, Ryan led development of open-source projects like Webmaker, Lightbeam, and Popcorn, and also kicked off the Foundation’s major online fundraising effort, resulting in over $1.8 million USD in individual donations from over 44,000 new donors.

Acquisition brings fully integrated e-commerce capabilities to Sitecore’s experience platform

Sitecore, a global leader in customer experience management software, announced this week that it has acquired commerceserver.net. Sitecore acquired commerceserver.net from SMITH (formerly Ascentium), a global digital experience agency that builds, sells and supports the Commerce Server e-commerce engine.

Agility Inc.’s co-founder Jonathan Voigt, previously CTO, is taking over as CEO to provide leadership and a focused vision moving forward. Heading into 2014, the company is planning to expand its team to offer premium services and extended support to meet the growing needs of its customers and partners.

Over the years, we all have abbreviated DotNetNuke as DNN as we've discussed this open source .Net based content management system. It looks like the corporate folks upstairs have finally made this interchangeability official. DotNetNuke Corp will now be known as DNN.

Alfresco and Acquia announced today a strategic partnership to deliver business critical content applications to their customers.With this relationship, Acquia builds on Alfresco’s open platform to extend the web experience applications that enable customers to quickly build content applications that span traditional documents, structured editorial workflows and dynamic multi-channel delivery. The combination is expected to give customers the freedom to combine content, community and commerce capabilities into unified digital experiences in order to drive business results.

Acquia announced significant growth in revenue and bookings as the company’s open source solutions are becoming more widely adopted. Acquia’s year-over-year revenue grew by 108 percent in 2012. According to the Boston Business Journal, this puts Acquia's revenue for 2012 at $45.3 million. Momentum continued in the first quarter of 2013, as Acquia’s bookings increased 52 percent compared to the first quarter of 2012 and more than 15 percent over the quarter prior.