@FIRST_LIGHT

As you may have heard, I recently joined Acquia as vice president of marketing. It’s wonderful to be part of such a strong team and to be able to work with such an incredible open source community. We’re going to do great things together.

So who am I? Well, first the important stuff: I’m a father of four great kids and an aspiring amateur photographer (a Nikon guy just like Dries). I also recently started blogging, and managed to get things running on Drupal last week.

I spent almost eight years leading software businesses at Adobe, Macromedia, and Allaire. See my LinkedIn profile for the gory details. During that time, I learned how to grow and work productively with the strong communities around our Flex, Flash, and ColdFusion product lines.

At Adobe I was part of the team that released Flex under an open source license and made the Tamarin ECMAScript virtual machine a joint open source project with Mozilla. It was exhilarating to help guide the company toward the open source strategy and then help the press and analyst community come to understand and accept our commitment to openness. This experience really prepared me to answer the call from Acquia when they contacted me last fall. It’s great to be on board.

We have LOT of great stuff on our Acquia marketing to do list this year. We need to build a world-class team of product marketers, product managers, and technical evangelists. We’ve committed to helping the Drupalcon Boston 2008 organizing team deliver a conference that absolutely rocks. We’ve got to work with the community to dramatically increase the industry profile of Drupal. And of course we need to successfully launch the initial set of Acquia products. It should be fun.

Beyond the Acquia to-do list, I also want to actively engage in the existing community initiatives focused on marketing Drupal. I’ve been tracking the Drupal Marketing group on Drupal.org for a while now and I look forward to participating more actively there, starting today.

Be sure to let me know if you have any suggestions or feedback. You can either leave a comment here, shoot me an email at jeff at acquia dot com or find me on groups.drupal.org as “jwhatcott”. I really look forward to hearing from you and working with you in the years ahead. And be sure to track me down at Drupalcon Boston 2008. You are going to be there, right?