Acquia, Inc

Acquia is a ground-breaking open source software company providing value-added products and services for the wildly popular Drupal social publishing system. The people of Acquia believe that the open source development approach and social publishing technology have the power to connect people and unleash their collective creative potential in order to achieve great things.

Dries Buytaert Co-founder and Benevolent Dictator

Dries is the original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform. He serves as president of the Drupal Association, a non-profit organization formed to help Drupal flourish. A native of Belgium, Dries holds a PhD in computer science and engineering from Ghent University.

Tom Erickson CEO

Tom started his career in open source in 1980 (really). Except that it was called public domain software, derivatives were completely legal and hosting in the cloud was provided in Seattle by Boeing. Joining Acquia in 2008 was a return to those values and concepts after almost 30 years of supporting the airline industry, helping enterprises around the world adopt new software technologies.

Prior to Acquia, Tom was Chief Products Officer at map maker Tele Atlas. Before that, he was CEO of Systinet, a leading provider of SOA tools that was acquired by Mercury Interactive and subsequently Hewlett Packard. Tom has also held executive positions with webMethods, the Baan Company and Watermark Software in addition to his early days at MRO Software, known as Project Software and Development, Inc. in 1980.

Tom is passionate about many things, so don’t get him started. His diversions include wine, food, photography, skiing, golf and traveling to Australia. His roots are in Wisconsin, and received a BS Honors in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the UW-Madison. In addition to Acquia, Tom serves on the boards of Quickcomm Pty. Ltd. (Australia), SeeWhy Ltd. (United Kingdom), and TaskRabbit, Inc. (your neighborhood). He loves it if you compliment him on his youth sports photography.

Jay Batson Co-founder, Vice President

Acquia is the second technology company Jay has (co-)founded, and is also his second commercial open-source effort (the previous having been Pingtel, which was acquired by Bluesocket in 2007.) Jay's work passion is to build great companies that build things that users are passionately happy with. When not obsessing about products, he builds miles on his custom Serotta, is a rabid pro cycling fan (getting his news at VeloNews - a Drupal site!), and spends time under the headphones listening to and spinning all styles of house and trance music.

Commercial open source vendor