Today we announced that Automatr, our marketing automation platform for Drupal, was built on the Net-Results platform. Although that has not exactly been a secret, it’s not something we had publicly announced prior to today so I wanted to take a few minutes to tell our partners and customers about this relationship and what it means to you and to Volacci going forward.

The partnership we have with Net-Results is about playing to our strengths. Net-Results provides a technology platform that is one of the best in the world in the marketing automation space. By using that platform, it gives us a really nice head start on building great marketing tools for Drupal; which is Volacci’s strength. We’ve been in the Drupal marketing space for many years and our mission is to build the best marketing tools that exist for Drupal. This partnership gives us an excellent platform to build them on.

When I first met Michael Ward and Matt Filios - the founder and President of Net-Results, I very quickly sensed that we had a lot in common. Volacci and Net-Results are very similar types of companies: we’re similar in size, our leadership thinks about the market in much of the same way, we are very entrepreneurial, and we’re willing to take risks in order to take on the market. We are very well aligned in our approach and that was important to me.

Not to mention the technology is great! Putting our technologies together makes a lot of sense to me. I could see right away that there would be some great synergies. For example, many of the other marketing automation platforms that we investigated require you to do things like embed their form in your Drupal site. Drupal already has a great form system in the Webform module; we don’t need another form system. We need a technology that can be integrated with Drupal’s webforms and that’s what Net-Results does with their web form mapping approach. Drupal owners can keep using the forms that you already have and map them into Automatr.

Another benefit is our open API. Everything that we’ve built for Drupal in Automatr has been done using an open API and that’s been really powerful. It’s allowed us to do a lot of very interesting things like personalization. That’s a huge new area that we’re exploring and it’s all built on data that we’re pulling out of the Net-Results system. We’re going to announce some really interesting tools for developers this year that will allow them to do things like change page content based on who is viewing the page. We wouldn’t have been able to do that with any other partner.

Our initial goal here for 2014 is to get a couple dozen Drupal partners to become users and builders of solutions using Automatr. If we can accomplish that then I believe we’ll be well on our way to a successful product launch. We’ll measure our success by how well the Drupal market responds to what we are offering. That is the bottom line. If we can create great tools for Drupal marketing then we’ll have done our job.

I’d love to see Automatr and Drupal become the de facto standard for building fantastic marketing platforms on mobile and the web. That’s what we are working toward here at Volacci and this partnership with Net-Results is a big part of making that happen.

Volacci CEO Ben Finklea talks about our new partnership, Automatr, and Drupal.automatr news, marketing automation, Planet Drupal