It happened several weeks ago, and the official announcement went out yesterday Wednesday, so I figured it's time to blog it: pingVision is an Acquia Platinum Partner, offering IA/TA, web design, development, deployment, performance tuning and consulting services for sites built using Acquia Drupal^*.

Acquia truly escalated the Drupal world when it came out with its commercially supported distribution of Drupal. Nothing is lost. It's all gain. Because Acquia Drupal is still Drupal, still free, still licensed under the GPL. And it's co-founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, meaning it's not at all likely to go off on its own fork. (Dries not only wouldn't want to, it wouldn't make business sense in the open source ecosystem.)

Check out the community modules included in Acquia Drupal:

• Admin Menu
• Advanced Help
• CCK
• Fivestar
• Google Analytics
• Image and ImageCache
• Pathauto
• Printer, e-mail and PDF versions of pages
• Tagadelic
• and, of course, Views, the powerful query builder developed by Earl Miles that enables non-coders to create custom filtered dynamic blocks and pages of content.

A new support resource

The Acquia Network of support offers some new reassurance to website owners and operators who might be a bit leery of venturing into the deep end of the open source pool.

You can get:

• Software update management
• System profile management
• Automated spam blocking with Mollom
• Heartbeat uptime monitoring
• Code modification detection
• Remote cron activation
• Online documentation
• Site usage statistics

Acquia also has a tech support team available via web, email and telephone, depending upon subscription level.

We're delighted to offer Acquia Drupal services. It's been a real pleasure working with the Acquia team these past few weeks. We look forward to many years working together to help spread Drupal around the world.

From the press release

Acquia, provider of the commercially supported distribution of the popular Drupal social publishing system, today announced that pingVision, the Drupal web developer behind websites such as PopSci.com and Pregnancy.org, has been selected to join the Acquia Partner Program as a Platinum service provider. pingVision has received substantial and sustained recognition for its Drupal technology solutions, and is fully committed and fully equipped to deliver sustainable business growth with Acquia-powered solutions.

"pingVision has a strong reputation for its leading technology solutions and has shown a deep commitment to furthering Acquia's vision. We're excited to have pingVision join the Acquia Partner Program as a platinum member," said Jay Batson, Acquia co-founder and CEO.

pingVision has won awards for design and development of Drupal-powered websites for clients including Bonnier, E.W. Scripps & Co., Stanford University and BlogHer, and is one of the few companies providing turnkey services for enterprise Drupal websites.

"Acquia Drupal and the Acquia Network are ideal for our clients of all sizes, who want that added level of support," said Laura Scott, co-founder and President of pingVision. "And by providing a fully supported distribution of Drupal for a website's foundation, Acquia affords us the opportunity to focus on the custom development, integrations and theming at the core of our business."

The Acquia Partner Program helps organizations of all sizes identify Drupal service providers with the expertise, experience and services to meet their unique website requirements. As an Acquia Platinum partner, pingVision can deliver custom solutions built on Acquia Drupal that connect to the Acquia Network for additional site management and network services, as well as technical support. Working together, Acquia and pingVision are focused on extending the reach of Drupal into new markets and application areas.

For more information, please visit: http://acquia.com/partners, and http://pingv.com.

And be sure to say hello!

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