After months of hard work, Acquia is now open for business! Starting today, everyone can connect their Drupal 6 site to the Acquia Network to take advantage of our services. Oh my!

The Acquia Network (previously code-named Spokes) is a hosted service that helps you with site management (update notifications, spam blocking, cron service, modification detection, etc) and provides real-time visibility into the health and usage of all your Drupal sites that are connected to the Acquia Network.

Second, the Acquia Network gives you access to Acquia's technical support team. Whether it is an installation question, a development question or a configuration question, our Drupal experts are ready to provide you with technical support. The kicker? Acquia Network subscriptions are available for every budget -- including a free community version. Give it a try!

Third, we are also releasing Acquia Drupal today. Acquia Drupal (previously code-named Carbon) is our Drupal distribution that bundles some of the best, most essential Drupal modules for building social publishing sites. Acquia Drupal is available for free, and all our bug fixes and improvements go straight to the module maintainers on drupal.org. Acquia Drupal defines the collection of modules that you can get technical support for.

Starting Acquia wasn't straightforward. To setup Acquia for success, it required hiring world-class people smarter than me, but that often lacked Drupal background, or even Open Source experience. It took a while before we hit our stride, but it is truly amazing to see how everyone got hooked on Drupal, and how much we have come together as a team. Thank goodness I didn't take that job at the bank, because I couldn't be happier. Everyone in the company is determined to contribute to Drupal's growing success, and with Acquia's offering, I think we can get Drupal into a lot of new and interesting places.

Going forward, you can expect us to help port more modules to Drupal 6 and to add more modules to Acquia Drupal to expand our support offering. You can also expect us to extend the existing network services in the Acquia Network and to see us add new network services that extend what we've started with update notifications, spam-blocking, and uptime monitoring. Details are available on our Acquia Drupal roadmap page (registration required) and on our Acquia Network roadmap page (registration required) respectively. And last but not least, you will continue to see Acquia employees be very active in the community. So buckle up, because this is only a glimpse of what is the come, and we're on the fast track now.