Nasdaq CIO and vice president Brad Peterson at the Acquia Engage conference showing the Drupal logo on Nasdaq's MarketSite billboard in Times Square NYC.

Last October, I shared the news that Nasdaq Corporate Solutions has selected Acquia and Drupal 8 for its next generation Investor Relations and Newsroom Website Platforms. 3,000 of the largest companies in the world, such as Apple, Amazon, Costco, ExxonMobil and Tesla are currently eligible to use Drupal 8 for their investor relations websites.

How does Nasdaq's investor relations website platform work?

First, Nasdaq developed a "Drupal 8 distribution" that is optimized for creating investor relations sites. They started with Drupal 8 and extended it with both contributed and custom modules, documentation, and a default Drupal configuration. The result is a version of Drupal that provides Nasdaq's clients with an investor relations website out-of-the-box.

Next, Nasdaq decided to offer this distribution "as-a-service" to all of their publicly listed clients through Acquia Cloud Site Factory. By offering it "as-a-service", Nasdaq's customers don't have to worry about installing, hosting, upgrading or maintaining their investor relations site. Nasdaq's new IR website platform also ensures top performance, scalability and meets the needs of strict security and compliance standards. Having all of these features available out-of-the-box enables Nasdaq's clients to focus on providing their stakeholders with critical news and information.

Offering Drupal as a web service is not a new idea. In fact, I have been talking about hosted service models for distributions since 2007. It's a powerful model, and Nasdaq's Drupal 8 distribution as-a-service is creating a win-win-win-win. It's good for Nasdaq's clients, good for Nasdaq, good for Drupal, and in this case, good for Acquia.

It's good for Nasdaq's customers because it provides them with a platform that incorporates the best of both worlds; it gives them the maintainability, reliability, security and scalability that comes with a cloud offering, while still providing the innovation and freedom that comes from using Open Source.

It is great for Nasdaq because it establishes a business model that leverages Open Source. It's good for Drupal because it encourages Nasdaq to invest back into Drupal and their Drupal distribution. And it's obviously good for Acquia as well, because we get to sell our Acquia Site Factory Platform.

If you don't believe me, take Nasdaq's word for it. In the video below, which features Stacie Swanstrom, executive vice president and head of Nasdaq Corporate Solutions, you can see how Nasdaq pitches the value of this offering to their customers. Swanstrom explains that with Drupal 8, Nasdaq's IR Website Platform brings "clients the advantages of open source technology, including the ability to accelerate product enhancements compared to proprietary platforms".