Acquia is looking to add to our Drupal expertise with Dries,our CTO and Drupal rockstar, we are offering a unique opportunity to become part of the band!!
Our Professional Services team is growing and searching to add traveling Drupalists to be the face of Acquia and our Drupal problem solvers. Based in Andover, MA, we need these rockstars to conquer the technical needs of our customers all over the globe!
As Technical Architect, you will be involved in all stages of the client experience including pre-sales, engagement planning, implementation, project management, client management, and post-deployment escalation support. You will engage with clients and teammates as both a leader and an individual contributor, building and maintaining a high-level of technical and business credibility with our clients and partners. You will be a key contributor to the development of our software and services offerings by relating customer experience to internal teams. Your job duties will vary and require excellent analytical skills and business judgment.
As Senior Technical Consultant, you will work directly with customers to accelerate and extend their adoption of Drupal. On each project you will define
Drupal deployments that meet customer requirements and implement those solutions in their environments. You will develop new modules to meet customer
needs and contribute to the Drupal community. Customer satisfaction will measure the success of your engagements. Acquia will use your experiences to
continue refining and evolving our solutions.
Check out a more detailed description at : http://acquia.com/jobs
You can contact me here at linda.greco or linda.greco@acquia.com or mobile; 603-548-0293 for more details!
Comments
Partner program doomed?
Looks like Acquia is getting into real consulting professional services. What would happen to the partner program then? Would Acquia take bigger leads and execute big projects and pass on smaller ones to partners?
Rick
Different kinds of Drupal consulting work
Hi Rick, our partnership program is getting a lot of interest, and we have several launch partners signed up already. On Drupal.org we estimate there is more than 1800 users who indicated they provide Drupal related services. Acquia doesn't aim to replace those 1800 and growing service providers. Nor do we aim to replace the hundreds of Drupal shops that build Drupal sites. Acquia will always turn to it's partners to build Drupal sites.
But sometimes when customers are using the Acquia distribution they might want some consulting that is strategic and particularly complementary to the Acquia Drupal product. In those cases we might take a professional services contract to focus on particular capacities of our product. Working closely with customers gives us insight into how to improve our product. But again, we would lead with a partner who is going to build the site.
A good example, is some consultation we did with Encyclopedia of Life. They wanted to prepare Drupal to meet their particular needs for creating a Drupal site for every species on earth. In particular, they felt that Taxonomy needed to be improved. We worked with the encyclopedia of life, to improve Drupal's core taxonomy. They held a Taxonomy sprint and invited Drupal developers from around the world. You can read more about the Taxonomy sprint on my blog. We enabled encyclopedia of life to add improvements to Drupal 7 by working with developers from the Drupal community, none of which were paid Acquia professional services employees.
A professional services organization is a normal part of any software company, and it is standard in the industry to have a software product professional services group along side partners. I realize it's new to the Drupal community, but it's old school and done widely for other software companies and other open source projects including MySQL, Linux, JBoss, Alfresco, etc.
I hope that provides some insight. If you have any concerns contact me directly and I'd be happy to address them.
Kieran
Kieran Lal
Bigger leads and projects will go to partners
Rick,
I appreciate your interest, and understand your concerns. From my perspective, you've got the equation backwards. I manage the Professional Services team and the Partner Program at Acquia, and my specific objective is to get the big projects to the partners and work on relatively small engagements with my team. We have some very specific criteria about when we might take on a longer project, and as Kieran notes, they're about helping to make Acquia better -- not about the revenue.
We will take on some small projects in our team, primarily "seed" projects that would lead to a bigger engagement down the road. In the past, I would chase that bigger project on my own. At Acquia, the goal is to hand the follow on work over to one of our partners to deliver on. As an example, I have two proposals out right now for "Migration Assessments" -- one to go from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 6, and another to move from a bespoke ASP system to Drupal. These are a week or two of Acquia's time, and I'll be setting up partners to complete the actual migration work. The third item I'm working on right now is a very large project with a major media company. I'm running the RFP process on Acquia's behalf (as the product vendor), and the project will be delivered entirely by Acquia Partners.
Chuck D'Antonio
Sr. Director of Professional Services
Acquia
Most Drupalists engage in SME businesses
The high profile, 'big' projects are not the majority of paid Drupal projects. You are competing with, and will probably eliminate the sources of most of us small timer's incomes.
Site buildng versus support
I took a few minutes to browse the 1800 forum topics and issues you've filed in the last year in a half. You certainly do require a lot of support. :-)
First, Acquia's top line business goal is to grow the Drupal project, and that benefits "small timer's" incomes by helping to create more demand which means more work and potentially higher rates for you.
Your profile doesn't indicate what company you work for, nor does it link to previous work or the kinds of services you are offering. In some of your threads you indicate that you are building a site with some 50 contributed modules. Your support requests are spread across lots of modules issue queues and forums. You were particularly bullish on the ubercart site and it's "speedy support forums", clearly you value good support when you can get it.
It's worth noting that in significant percentage of the issues and forum topics you've submitted you've gotten no response on Drupal.org. If you did manage to solve the problem, more often than not you didn't come back with a follow-up indicating that you solved the problem and what the solution was. Would it have been helpful if more have them had been answered?
Would it help your site development efforts, if there was a source to turn to ensure you could get some of your software supported? Since Acquia already is contributing back to many of the modules you use you are directly you are benefiting from those fixes.
If you want to check and see if some of the contributions are in fact helping you build your site see my blog post on Acquia's code contributions back to the Drupal project.
I'd like to help you transition from nervous, to delighted. Let me know how we can help you grow your business.
Cheers,
Kieran
Kieran Lal
Quite the background check
Just for stating "You are competing with, and will probably eliminate the sources of most of us small timer's incomes."? Since you're not refuting that, guess I better be ducking and running for cover already.
death to freelancers? hardly.
Ulf, I think you might be blowing this whole thing out of proportion.
There will always be a need for freelancers, who don't have the overhead of the big web dev shops. Likewise, freelancers aren't equipped to handle larger projects like the big web dev shops can.
I've worked in both capacities and each have their advantages/disadvantages. Each fulfills a different need in the marketplace.
So, just relax. Nobody's trying to take food off your table. If you're a skilled developer who takes care his customers, you'll have more referrals than you can handle. Pick quality clients and projects and you'll be fine.
Regards,
John
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"The sting in any rebuke is the truth." - Benjamin Franklin
Many benefits for small shops
I recently joined Acquia as a support specialist. These views are mine and are not Acquia's or anyone else's. I don't work directly on the partner team but these views aren't about my understanding of the program from within, rather what I saw prior to joining Acquia.
Prior to joining Acquia as an employee I was running a small Drupal development shop full time. A great deal of my interest in Acquia came through what I learned about the partner program while I was running that small shop. Here are some of the things it seemed to mean to me at that point (and IMO still means to those making a living from Drupal). You could talk to my clients and find out that as early as May I was recommending they buy Acquia services when they became available... before there was pricing or a complete description but because it was clear it would fit nicely with our business.
* A partner program that could help us put together larger opportunities, to help connect my shop with other shops in order for us to participate in opportunities we would otherwise not have been aware of or considered for.
* An organization that could handle the routine support so I could spend more time working in the community, evangelizing, working on projects and closing deals, all of which are much more profitable lines of work, especially for a small shop. And a model that allowed us to remain engaged so that when they needed development/SME/consulting work we could do it and have Acquia with hours, pagers and 24x7 support for the more operational matters in between.
* That there would be a place I could refer inquiries that we didn't take on (whether for size, scope, vertical market, lack of time etc.) and I could know that the lead would go to a shop that would not cause embarrassment the next time I saw that business owner. Sure we still tend to share with our local networks but our local IRC channel has far more requests for people to take jobs than there are people to go around.
* That I could compete in markets/jobs I previously would have been excluded from. There are plenty of corporate, gov't., education etc. jobs that require a much larger organization to stand behind support than I had - or desired to build. When somebody is looking at SitePoint or Red Dot vs. Drupal they want to know there is somebody they can call and get support and a partnership with Acquia presented which otherwise would have excluded the consideration of Drupal or my shop from the process.
* The influence of another large Drupal presence in the market would be a good thing. The list of large consulting/development groups is long... I'd list some here but I'd certainly miss some and that would be wrong but anybody in the Drupal community knows the names. But what about those outside the Drupal community? Even just having a company like Acquia getting the Drupal brand into the media more and in front of more large organizations has a huge impact on small Drupal shops. Likely my shop would never bid on a job for GM, EDS, HP or Sony, but we are helped greatly by those companies being aware of Drupal. It is the folks who leave those organizations and start their own businesses who will be the bread and butter of small shops. And who knows when the ink-jet cartridge division of HP goes looking for a local shop to setup a site and because those local managers have heard of Drupal we stand a better shot at the gig.
When I made the decision to join Acquia I looked very carefully at these things. First of all I believe that if Acquia were to cause smaller shops difficulty that it would hurt both Drupal and Acquia. What I found was very consistent with what I'd seen in the partner program information. That this was an organization that was committed to making any and every Drupal shop as successful as they could be. That there would be some very carefully crafted and narrowly focused professional services engagements and that this would be a very small part of what Acquia did and would be done in a way that would benefit partners and the Drupal community as a whole.
Obviously I cannot alleviate your concerns. What I would suggest is signing up, trying the GPL free Acquia Drupal, sign up for a free Acquia Network account (free if you sign up before the end of the year) and sign up to get partner program information... see what the offering is and consider whether it would be complimentary to your business goals. I hazard a guess it just might be.
Josh
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Blog: Adding Understanding
Drupal Developer Search
Drupal Services: Brauer Ranch
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Technical Architect,
Technical Architect, Consultant?
He he, I would be more impressed if I didn't get Fatal error: Call to undefined function drupal_get_path_alias() in /var/www/2008081300/sites/all/modules/securesite/securesite.module on line 223 errors on the Acquia site when I click on 'About Us'
Passing Phase Web Development
MA
Whats 'MA'? Malaysia?
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peach from All Drupal Themes
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Thats Massachusetts.
Thats Massachusetts.