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A week ago I held a presentation about Acquia and Acquia Partnership in Austrian Drupal community and got some interesting feedback that I would like to share with.

Recently MontenaSoft acquired Acquia Silver Partnership (as a first Austrian based company, which make us very proud). Acquia is a company that provides professional support for Drupal related systems and is owned by the people who created the Drupal in the first place (notably, Dries Buytaert, that initiated Drupal in the first place is also a founder of Acquia). Silver Partnership is generally suited for small Drupal development companies that wants to pass the burden of support to someone who has the 24/7 capabilities. It also brings some other extras; more on that can be found here.

Experience has shown that getting the Partnership can take some time (no wonder if you take into account hundred thousands of users on www.drupal.org ). So I wanted to share MontenaSoft’s knowledge with other people in our local community about the process of getting partnership – and how to speed up the application process (details can be found in PDF export here).

Response to presentation was interesting: companies that usually work on 15.000+ Euro projects were interested in more details. They see it mostly as a good argument for sales, because that can bring them better position during negotiation of 50.000+ Euro projects. Generally, they were not interest in other Acquia services (like Acquia Search, for instance). The reason for that could be the lack of knowledge about the whole spectrum of Acquia products, because the number of Acquia web services exploded in the last 6 months.

Smaller companies (i.e. smaller projects) are generally not very interesting in passing the support to someone else. The reason for that is clear: support brings them the cache flow that helps them to survive. The counterarguments like “well, Acquia Partnership is a very cheap way of getting some extra marketing that will boost your sails, besides potential referrals from Acquia. And you will be recognized as valuable member of Drupal community, which will at the very end bring you more complex projects.” seems not to function very well.

Silver Partnership is addressing exactly this kind of companies, small software shops that usually work on 1 to 3 man/months projects. So what could be the reason for this reaction? I refer it mostly as a lack of faith in community & open source based business models – people do not believe that they are good in that what they do and do not believe that open source development model (i.e. sharing with community) can survive as their own business model. If someone founds 250 USD too much for something as immaterial as a potential marketing boost “somewhere in the future”…well, this is also an approach that can not be criticized so easily: everyone is free to choose their wishes and their perspectives. We should always take extra precautions when talking about companies that are struggling to survive.

For us, MontenaSoft, getting Acquia Partnership was a corner stone of our business model: we want to become one of the most influential providers of Drupal services – and by that I mean, most influential in terms of Drupal community. And we wanted to come into position to work with other Drupal companies on really exciting projects (which also mean big projects). This kind of projects will come and can be coordinated only through the network of Acquia’s partners, because a big customer wants substantial support – they can not allow themselves to go offline for “technical reasons”.

So I think that some very interesting times are coming to MontenaSoft, both in terms of technology and project management and I am excited about opportunities that are opening to us: we already got inquiries all over the world. Mostly, that was about developing projects of complexity scale that were hard to imagine just one year ago and I am pretty confident that very soon you will have the opportunity to read more about it in our Portfolio.

Presentation Slides: Acquia Partnership 101 how to.pdf