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Dries Buytaert and Tom Erickson journey to set up Acquia

Leave a Comment / start-up, Tech Story / By Jayshri

Acquia enabled the Drupal-open source platform, on which one can build, run, as well, optimize sites. It is a software service firm set up by Dries Buytaert and J. Batson. The founder established the platform considering providing enterprise products, and services. Also, to provide technical support especially to Drupal. Currently, Michael Sullivan is serving as the CEO of the firm. Acquia, set up in 2007 has marked the name as the fastest-growing private tech firm of North America by 2013. As well, it was among the DELOITTE’s fastest 500 in 2014.

About Acquia

It is one of the leading software firms that enabled the best Drupal platform. In 2007, Dries set up the firm with his partner. Currently, it is providing miscellaneous software service. Also, it is helping some of the world’s leading brands succeed, including Twitter, Mercedes Benz, Warner Music Group, and Stanford University. More than 4,000 organizations are using Acquia’s solutions for content, community, and commerce.

Glimpse to founders Life- Dries Buytaert

He attended Ghent University, Belgium to study computer science. Earlier, Dries worked as Linux-WLAN FAQ maintainer from 1999 to 2000. Presently, he is a well-known software programmer, who is recognized as one of the lead developers of the Drupal content administration platform.

The Backstory of Acquia Foundation

As a well-experienced software programmer, he always wanted to develop a feasible platform for Drupal. With his partner Jay Batson, the idea came into reality after setting up Acquia in December 2007. A software company that enabled products and services as well, technical support for Drupal. As Red hat is important for Linux similarly, Acquia is for Drupal. In a short duration, the firm assists to re-launch Whitehouse.gov on Drupal in 2009.

Dries Buytaert’s other contributions

Apart from being a co-founder, he served as a CTO of the company. In 2008, he launched a service called Mollom. It is especially for stopping website spams. So that sites can keep clean as well, content quality will maintain high. Nowadays, this service is a spam filter as well, a CAPTCHA server.

Awards and Recognition

BusinessWeek selected him as a Young Entrepreneurs of Tech in 2008. Also, Dries named as one of the top 35 innovators under the age of 35, worldwide by MIT Technology Review TR35.

Tom Erickson- Former CEO

He is a founding director of the company, who worked with co-founders to develop the company’s open-source commercialization model. Also, he assisted to recruit the early team members during 2008. In 2009, he joined Acquia as CEO. Before that, he served as a Chief product officer, managing the sale of Tele Atlas to TomTom. During his tenure as a CEO, he guided the firm to exponential growth depends on the fanatical commitment to the customers. At Acquia, he leads the unique blending of open source, enterprise software, and digital agency.

Personal life

He attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison for studying electrical and computer engineering. After that, he began a career in the technical field. Tom worked in many countries including England, Australia, and France, where he spent almost 14 years of his career. Apart from Acquia, he also was the Systinet’s CEO.

Michael Sullivan- Present CEO

He succeeded T. Erickson and became the Chief Executive Officer of a firm in 2017. Also, he is SVP and General Manager, SaaS and Information Management at Micro Focus. Michael also worked as a VP & General Manager, HP Software, Autonomy Protect at HP Autonomy. Furthermore, he is the founder and former President of Steelpoint technologies Inc. Sullivan attended Bentley University for his graduation. Currently, he is serving at Acquia. Under his guidance, the company continues the miscellaneous software products and services on the Drupal platform.

Awards and Recognition of Acquia

In 2012, Acquia was ranked 8 on the Inc. 500 list, 1st software company and 8th company in Boston. Also, Inc. Magazine named it in a 500 fastest-growing private companies list. It also names as fastest-growing private tech firm of North America by 2013. As well, it was among the DELOITTE’s fastest 500 in 2014. Apart from that, it has famous at the industry level after Gartner Magic Quadrant honored it as a Leader for Web Content Administration in 2014. Further, also honored as a Strong Performer in 2015 in Web Content Management.

Jayshri

Jayshri is an Electronics Engineer, but her passion towards writing made her to be in this field. Apart from content writing, she loves reading, writing and surfing on various topics. In her free time, she likes to watch TV series and news. Sherlock Holmes is her all time favorite show. Jayshri loves cooking various Indian-western dishes.

Rasmus Lerdorf : An Insightful Programmer and the Creator of PHP

Leave a Comment / Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

The history of PHP programming language narrates the story of a programmer who prefers to be known as an engineer than a coder. Because according to this engineer, the end product is what matters the most and not the journey to it. Well, seems like his mind works more like a thermodynamic state function and less like a path-dependent parameter, isn’t it?

This remarkably excellent engineer is none other than world-famous programmer Rasmus Lerdorf. On one of his interviews, Lerdorf said that coding is quite boring and tedious, which is insignificant contrast to who he is and his occupation. So, let’s get to know more about this big guy and his ‘path’ to success.

Early Life

Born into a family from Disko Island, Greenland, on 22nd November 1968, Rasmus Lerdorf moved to Denmark at an early age of three. At the age of fifteen, Lerdorf and his family moved to King City, Ontario. In 1988, Lerdorf graduated from King City Secondary School and pursued his higher studies from the University of Waterloo. He graduated from the university in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree of Applied Science in Systems Designing Engineering.

After he graduated, Lerdorf made significant contributions to the relational database management systems like Oracle Rdb.

Working With Programming Languages

When the programmers and the tech-savvies were working in the mid-90s with their main motive to make the internet more efficient and faster, he got hindered by languages like C and Perl. According to Rasmus Lerdorf, designing websites with these languages were too time consuming and needed to come up with a new one.

Lerdorf, along with some of the technical writers, assembled their ideas together and got them online as an HTML page. He wanted to take a step ahead, only when some companies asked for these documents or expand the idea and implement it in the practical world.

Creating PHP

He started working in CGI (common gateway interface), developed few libraries, wrote some programs in C, and finally, developed PHP, an entirely new language. Lerdorf created PHP (personal home page, now known as hypertext preprocessor) in 1994, and till now, many modified versions of the language has been released.

In a generalized way, PHP is a programming language that was designed for web development and can be used almost on every operating system. The most recent version of PHP is PHP 7.3 released on 6th December 2018.

After PHP became a very well known and useful language to big companies, Rasmus Lerdorf explained that he never intended to create a programming language, as he had no clue how to build one. He was making logical implementations to create something simpler than Perl, and one thing led to another. Finally, after forming a tech team to assist him with technical documentation, which followed beta testing, PHP/FI 2 was released in November 1997.

The Success

Today, PHP is a majorly used programming language, being used by websites like Etsy, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Yahoo, Flickr, Facebook, and many more.

Over the years, many features have been incorporated in PHP, but Lerdorf keeps telling one thing to every emerging engineer out there, that for a programmer, it is very important to understand C very well. Though he accepts that as compared to languages, like Python or C++, the user needs to put comparatively more effort using C, but it is the fundamental unit of learning for any programmer.

After releasing PHP, he worked with different big tech companies, and currently, he is working with Etsy.

Career of Lerdorf

In January 2000, Rasmus Lerdorf joined Linuxcare Inc. as a senior research engineer and continued for a year. In September 2002, he joined Yahoo! where he continued for seven years, as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer. Lerdorf said that eventually, he became tired and kind of demoralized working in an ad centric web company, as it involves tricking your customers.

He joined Room 77 as an advisor in 2010, and then, it’s all about WePay and Etsy. It’s been eleven years, that he has been working in Etsy, first as an advisor, and then, as a distinguished engineer.

Lerdorf as every other enthusiastic programmer is very much interested in open source, and he attends the open-source conferences as a speaker throughout the world.

Annasha

Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

Roy Rubin : The Founder of Magento, the Open-Source E-Commerce Platform

Leave a Comment / Founder, Inspiration, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Annasha

With the advent of new technologies and rapid development in our world, especially in terms of science and technology, tech-savvies are crawling all over the surface. And, this rapid growth in technology and the development through it, can mostly be witnessed amongst the school and college students.

The most obvious evidence of scientific and technical development in our society is the innumerable establishment of tech-related start-ups, like e-commerce platforms, digital payment platform, Open-source community, online market place, etc., taking place currently.

Magento is one such gigantic open source e-commerce platform that was created in 2008 by a student, Roy Rubin. It all dates back to 2004 when Varien, the company that owned Magento overtook one of its competitors and changed the status of the business forever.

Varien-From Where It All Started

Since childhood, Rubin had a great interest in the development and technical stuff, and he was completely engrossed in the idea of the subject. He made his mind to pursue engineering, and alongside, he also grew an interest in starting a business of his own.

He didn’t have greater plans when he was working on this business plan of his, as he only saw it as an opportunity to gain more knowledge, more professionalism and enough money to maintain a sober lifestyle of a student.

Initially, he started making small progress with web development, web applications, e-commerce, and content management, as he wasn’t selective about picking a single domain. But soon, he felt like everything was going topsy-turvy in his business, and eventually, he realized that it’s important to be focused on one single thing to achieve success.

While Roy Rubin was making step-wise progress, a major breakthrough took place in 2004, when he started his own company named Varien and also got a job at OsCommerce. With a few weeks of studies related to OsCommerce, he concluded that the company shared mutual goals with Varien, but the former lacked better quality of services and enough employees. He saw it as a golden opportunity to stream down customers to Varien, which was better than OsCommerce in every aspect. Thus, he invested some of his own money in Google AdWords, and the result was unexpected.

This decision of Roy Rubin changed the future of Varien forever and gave him a better scope to expand his business.

Releasing Magento

After releasing an advertisement in Google AdWords, Varien landed its one of his biggest clients. Rubin, in one of his interviews, said that if it hadn’t been for the advertisement, the company could have never managed to launch a product like Magento. Because, that specific company was entirely responsible for the funding of this e-commerce platform, now known as Magento.

The first public beta version of Magento was released on 31 August 2007. Varien launched Magento, an open-source e-commerce platform, as its product. It was written in PHP, and the first general availability of this software was released on 31st March 2008.

Ownership, Growth and Success of Magento

In February 2011, eBay bought a 49% share of Magento, followed by the entire acquisition of the company on 6th June 2011. But, Rubin continued to work as the CEO of Magento. But, in 2013 he stepped down and left the company.

On 3rd November 2015, Permira acquired the company, and finally, on 19th June 2018, Adobe took the ownership of Magento for $1.68 billion.

On 17th November 2015, the company released the second version of Magento, i.e. Magento 2.0. Since then, Magento is considered as the top digital e-commerce platform around the world.

On 19th October 2016, Rubin joined Magento Board of Directors, and he said that the pace at which Magento was growing was really commendable.

Rubin and Akeneo

Rubin joined Akeneo, a French company for open source product as an advisor in 2016. Since, Akeneo was also a company related to open source, the CEO of Akeneo mentioned that they were grateful to have a person like Rubin in their team. In Akeneo, Rubin is responsible for making the strategic decisions for the short-term goals of the company.

Roy Rubin is a true businessman, and a visionary, who keeps inspiring every start-up related to open-source platform out there. His role in Magento followed by his strategies in Akeneo is incredible.