• Read more about Is Acquia the Right Platform Choice?

You’re having trouble keeping up with demand and need a more powerful and robust website platform.

As business problems go, that’s a great one to have. Especially for enterprise-grade organizations and government entities. The question is: Which website platform is best?

To help you make informed decisions about your platform choice, we’re sharing a look at what Acquia has to offer. In this post, you’ll learn what Acquia is and how it works, who should consider using the platform and who should not. Then you’ll read our thoughts on what should be top of mind when selecting a platform.

Full disclosure: Mobomo is an Acquia partner organization, meaning we help clients make the most of their Acquia technology and services. Far from being a hard sell, however, this post aims solely to provide expert analysis and an honest assessment of the company and its products.

What Acquia Is and How It Works

Acquia is considered a digital experience platform (DXP), which is a collection or suite of products that work in concert to manage and optimize the user’s digital experience. These products can include a CRM, analytics, commerce applications, content management and more.

In its industry report on DXPs, Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, Gartner defines a digital experience platform as “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences…Leaders have ample ability to support a variety of DXP use cases and consistently meet customers’ needs over substantial periods. Leaders have delivered significant product innovation in pursuit of DXP requirements and have been successful in selling to new customers across industries.”

Organizations use DXPs to build, deploy and improve websites, portals, mobile and other digital experiences. They combine and coordinate applications, including content management, search and navigation, personalization, integration and aggregation, collaboration, workflow, analytics, mobile and multichannel support.

Acquia is one of the major players in this space, and the only one designed solely for Drupal.

Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert was in graduate school in 2000 when he created the first Drupal content management framework. Buytaert and Jay Batson then established Acquia in 2007 to provide infrastructure, support and services to enterprise organizations that use Drupal.

Features and Benefits of Acquia

Acquia initially offered managed cloud hosting and fine-tuned services for Drupal. It has since expanded on its Drupal foundation to offer a complete DXP, including but not limited to:

• Acquia Cloud: Provides Drupal hosting, development tools, hosting services and enterprise grade security.
• Acquia Lightning: An open source Drupal 8 distribution with preselected modules and configuration to help developers build sites and run them on Acquia Cloud.
• Acquia Digital Asset Management: A cloud-based digital asset management tool and central library for Drupal sites.
• Acquia Commerce Manager: Provides a secure and flexible platform for content-rich experiential commerce.
• Mautic: A marketing automation platform that enables organizations to send and personalize multi-channel communications at scale.
• Acquia Journey: An omnichannel tool that allows marketers to listen and learn from customers to craft a sequence of personalized touchpoints and trigger what they will see next.

Additionally, Acquia provides comprehensive logging, performance metrics, security and Drupal application insights, and uptime alerts organizations need to monitor and optimize applications.

The Acquia platform also shines in its security capabilities, supporting strict compliance programs such as FedRAMP, HIPAA, and PCI, among others. Acquia customers can also internally manage teams at scale with advanced teams and permissions capabilities.

And they’re running with the big dogs. Other DXP companies assessed in the Gartner Magic Quadrants report include Adobe, IBM, Salesforce, Liferay, SAP, Adobe, Microsoft and Oracle.

In that report, Gartner cited Acquia’s key strengths as follows:

• Acquia Experience Cloud offers a wide array of capabilities well-suited to support the B2C use case. Some clients also use it for B2B and B2E use cases.
• The open-source community behind Acquia, which is the main contributor to the underlying Drupal WCM system, is highly active and well-supported by the vendor.
• Acquia’s partner ecosystem continues to grow, offering choices to clients looking for expertise in specific verticals and availability in specific regions.

Who Should Consider Acquia

In a nutshell, Acquia is a good fit for enterprise-grade clients and government entities needing a comprehensive and powerful platform that optimizes the entire user experience while integrating data from multiple sources to support decision-making. Organizations that deploy and manage multiple websites will find Acquia particularly helpful.

One glance at Acquia’s customer page crystalizes the scope and scale of organizations they serve. Brands using Acquia include Wendy’s, ConAgra Brands, University of Virginia, City of Rancho Cucamonga in California and Australia’s Department of the Environment and Energy.

According to Website Planet, what sets Acquia apart is their foundation in the open-source Drupal content management framework. Unlike many of their competitors, Acquia allows customers to buy resources and features individually rather than purchasing entire pre-made packages. This can be particularly appealing to organizations who already have a couple of strong individual solutions in place that they want to integrate into their DXP, such as this reviewer in the manufacturing industry:

"A few things drove me to this solution: Decoupled architecture that allowed me to build a completely distributed digital landscape while keeping central control, The Open Platform concept that allowed me to build my own integrations and connect different components of my existing Martech stack without always using the "default" provided options and the comfort/security of relying on a cloud-based solution with full service support on top.

For e-commerce website owners, Acquia’s packages provide a PCI DSS compliant solution that can easily scale to accommodate extensive product catalogs, large transaction volumes and surges in traffic. Acquia’s proprietary e-commerce manager integrates the various content, commerceand user interfaces, allowing you to provide seamless experiences to your customers through a single system."

Who Should Not Consider Acquia

Acquia is best suited for organizations with both the need for such a powerful suite of tools and the development expertise to easily implement and manage it. Beginners and small businesses lacking the requisite knowledge of programming and Drupal are likely better off with a different provider.

For those who develop their website through an agency, you’ll want to double-check that they will provide developers experienced with Drupal 8. If you do develop in-house, make sure your developers have strong familiarity with it.

Additionally, Acquia’s power comes at a price: Its price point may put it out of reach for small-to-medium businesses.

Acquia: Our Takeaway

As with any other significant investment, the best choice for your organization boils down to your wants and needs of you, the consumer. Keep these points in mind assessing how well Acquia matches up with your master list of must-haves.

• Determine your desired business outcome. Think about what you’re after in terms of improving the business. What does each DXP offer and can you make the most of every feature you’re paying for?
• Know your stack. Document your current technology architecture: what do you have, who uses it, for what and how is it connected?
• Determine use cases. Who will use your technology and how will it make them productive?
• Prepare your people. Your personnel play a massive role in assembling your digital experience technology stack. Don’t set yourself up to spend time and money on a platform that doesn't get adopted or used to its potential.

By conducting a thorough assessment of your organization’s needs, capabilities, and goals, you can readily determine whether Acquia is the best fit to help you provide an amazing digital experience for your audience.

Contact us today and find out how Mobomo can help you make the most of Acquia.

• Read more about The Future of Cloud Services: What’s in Store for Your Business?

Where should your business data and processes “live?”

In the cloud? If so, then where in the cloud? Through cloud services such as Amazon Web Services?  Google Cloud? Microsoft Azure? Or should you turn to Cloudways brands such as DigitalOcean, Linode, or Vultr?

Or, maybe you should side with the number of businesses that primarily keep data on-premises, using static web technology to minimize exposure and optimize speed.

Then again, perhaps a mix of technologies – including tailored microservices – will help you achieve your objectives.

Read on as we discuss expert predictions on the future of cloud services, what your options are, and how to make the right tech choices for your business

Predictions on the Future of Cloud Services

Writer Nick Hastreiter interviewed a number of tech leaders recently for a piece on cloud services. These leaders, from disruptive startups to big-brand heavyweights, shared their vision on what to expect … and they don’t all agree with where things are heading:

• Michael Corrado of Hewlett Packard Enterprise thinks cloud computing will likely morph into a hybrid solution, combining cloud-based software and on-premises hardware. Such a solution would balance the scalability and flexibility of the cloud with the security of a private data center.
• Jeff Fisher of Kemptechnologies agrees, calling the future of cloud computing, “undeniably hybrid.” He predicts organizations will leverage multiple cloud platforms, both private and large-scale public (like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure), helping them avoid locking into a single provider. But, that will introduce additional complexity, as IT staff need to become comfortable operating in more than one cloud platform environment.
• On the other hand, SwiftType founder Mike Riley thinks by 2030, businesses will be operating mostly from the cloud, enjoying the productivity and efficiency that that platform provides. By then, he said, a major concern will relate to access. “We’re already seeing fragmentation of content and data and it’s posing problems related to organization, search, discovery, and most importantly, collaboration.” Riley predicts that monolithic application suites will be used less and less.
• David Hartley of UHY LLP takes things even further, predicting that “traditional data centers and the traditional model of delivering IT services will become extinct.” The days of building your own data center, owning your own equipment and installing or updating hardware will leave fade away rapidly, Hartley said. As software-, infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service providers assume a larger role, Hartley says, there will be more space for independent firms to be hired to test processes and controls, develop service organization control analyses, and report financial and IT services and processes to user organizations.

Overcoming the Cloud’s Limits

And what is Mobomo’s take on this?

We think organizations will take a critical approach, picking and choosing what works right for them. And in some cases, what’s “right” may not always be cloud-based.

Simply put, the cloud isn’t great for everything. You don't want to use it for active directory or credential management, for example. Latency precludes putting that large of an asset in the cloud unless you're a large-scale, widely based company. For about 95 percent of use cases, having an active directory or authentication onsite would make more sense than relying on cloud services, and in general, is more cost-effective.

 

The Resurgence of Static Pages

Another, perhaps surprising trend emerging is the return to static websites, or web pages with fixed content. Unlike dynamic websites, static sites don’t require programming or database design.

Two main drivers are behind this resurgence:

1. Page Speed

Some organizations are eschewing programmatic web pages because programming can slow or disrupt a user experience. The challenge, then, is to create static pages and host them out of an object data store such as Amazon S3. A flat file stored in S3 can serve a lot faster than if Drupal has to reach into a database, gather information, and render it into a page before the user can access it.

2. Security

One way to fend off hackers is to give them nothing to hack. If there's no CMS or programming to compromise, you can't be compromised. But using improperly secured S3, of course, introduces its own security concerns, primarily exposure to data leaks. But if you have S3 properly secured, then there's no way that a hacker can compromise your systems via your site.

Cloud services like S3 are easy to use, inexpensive, and provide static hosting without having to configure anything. You don't have to figure out how to put your data centers in storage partitions onto the web. S3 handles it for you.

 

The Role of Microservices

While microservices architecture is not exclusively relevant to cloud computing, according to IBM there are a few important reasons they so frequently are discussed together.

First and foremost are the utilization and cost benefits associated with deploying and scaling components individually.

True, these benefits are still present to some extent with on-premises infrastructure. But combining small, independently scalable components with on-demand, pay-per-use infrastructure enables much larger cost optimizations.

Another key advantage of microservices is that each individual component can adopt the stack best suited to its specific job. Cloud services are a boon here, as they can minimize the management challenges with stack proliferation.

Additionally, microservices can improve security. The more you separate out microservices, the more security layers you can wrap around each one. When individual services are able to run only when needed, you can better protect the system as a whole and possibly save money, too.

When it comes to cloud services in 2020, the theme is “right fit.” Organizations should look at the many different options available to them and pick and choose from these options to create customized systems that work best for their needs and their resources.

If you’re not sure what the right fit is, expert consultants (like the ones here at Mobomo) can help you assess the best options for your organization.

Contact us today to learn more.

• Read more about 2017 Total Solar Eclipse: Architecting the #1 Online Viewing Experience with Drupal and the Cloud

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• Read more about Mobomo Presents Drupal Con Summit on NASA Eclipse Partnership

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