GVS, Drupal Scout, acquired by industry leader Acquia

Team GVS — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 20:02:10 +0000

We're excited to announce that Growing Venture Solutions and Drupal Scout have been acquired by Acquia. As a leading provider of cloud and support services for Drupal, it was clear that Acquia provides a unique complement of infrastructure and scalability to Drupal Scout. Following discussions about how best to work together, we decided to join the Acquia team. As a result, several GVS brands and the core GVS team are now part of Acquia. We are really excited for this opportunity.

Plans for GVS brands

In addition to the expert Drupal consulting, security training, security review services that we'll be taking to Acquia, GVS has several spinoff brands, many—but not all—of which are now part of Acquia.

Mastering Drupal: screencasts and e-books for learning Drupal. The Mastering Drupal brand and content are a great complement to the existing Acquia Library and Acquia training
UseCOD.com: Branding for the Conference Organizing Distribution. COD will remain a community distribution, and Ezra plans to continue as the project's maintainer. Moving the brand lets us put more marketing muscle behind it for increasing adoption of the platform and Drupal. We've got more details about the future of COD on that site's blog.

In contrast to those projects/brands:

Certified to Rock will remain an independent project. We are working to establish a broad team of Drupal community members to manage the service. The current CTR team will continue to play a big role in the project. If you are interested in helping to run CTR, read more about the CTR groupie program.

Plans for GVS team

The core GVS team will be joining Acquia.

Greg and Ben will help grow Acquia's security offerings, with Greg as the Director of Security Services and Ben as a Senior Engineer focusing on products for Drupal security.
Ezra is bringing his experience as a distribution maintainer to the Acquia Commons distribution, where he'll be working as a Senior Engineer.
Continuing her focus on user experience, Lisa will be working on a range of Acquia products as a Usability Specialist.
Instead of joining the rest of the team at Acquia, Carl will continue to work as an independent consultant and trainer in the Denver area.

We're so grateful to our clients and to the amazing Drupal community who helped to make this possible!

For now we will all be staying in the same locations. You can expect to see us at events in New York and Colorado just like always.

As individuals we may make the time to blog about why we joined Acquia and our time at GVS. Greg did already.

Branding Exercise Leaves Fish Dead, Owl Satisfied, Drupalers sad

Ezra — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:24:20 +0000

A routine branding exercise went awry early Friday in Brooklyn when Growing Venture Solutions performed a "mind map" exercise to aid in the creation of logos for two of their flagship products, the Scout hosted sercurity review service and COD, the Conference Organizing Distribution for Drupal.

"Connecting to the unintellectualized, visceral, gut responses we get from each logo helps us maximize branding potential so that we can produce marketing collateral that's sure to engage members of our target market segments, helping them to connect to each brand at an emotional level, which results in increased conversions" said social media expert Robert H. McJellyPants. He added, "Tachyon converter beam subspace electron resonance tuning."

Unfortunately, while exercise participants were discussing their friendly, communal associations with schools of smiling fish in the COD logo, as well as some of the more stern, defensive associations evoked by the Scout owl logo, the owl took flight and picked up the fish, instantly crushing the fish's vital internal organs with its beak.

Illustration by Carl Wiedemann.

Needless to say, participants were horrified at the sudden attack by the owl but impressed by its swift, decisive action in the face of what the owl saw as a potential security risk to its personal website, SupercuteCatsWearingWigsandSmallDressesTailoredEspciallyforCatsNoThisisnotajoke.com/website.

McJellypants expressed concern, saying "This is highly unusual for a branding exercise, and the attack could be a step in the wrong direction for both brands. It may cause people to construe the owl as reckless and aggressive, rather than defensive and wise." He pointed out that "[i]t makes the COD logo more similar to the previous one, which was also a dead fish," referring to the public domain image of an Atlantic cod that previously represented the Conference Organizing Distribution.

COD has been used to power many feature-rich conference websites for DrupalCamps, the recent DrupalCon Chicago conference, as well as non-Drupal events in the United States, India and Australia.

When asked to justify the attack, the owl provided participants with helpful information about the specific security vulnerability it claimed was presented by the fish. However, for more information, it directed them to its "Scout Automated Plus" and "Scout Enterprise" solutions, where Drupal security experts explain potential vulnerabilities on specific sites—and the steps to mediate them—in great detail.

Despite having clear expertise in Drupal security, it was reported in several tweets on Friday that the owl's personal site had the full HTML input format enabled for anonymous commenters early Friday morning. The issue appears to be resolved as of the publication of this article, though one comment on the site by "IttyBittyPrettyWittyKittyCommitteeinNewYorkCitySingingaDitty36" appeared to show a properly escaped cross-site scripting attack probe, and read, <script>alert('XSS Vulnerable Meeeeow');</script>

When reached for comment, the owl tried to bite off my face.

Two of the mind-map exercise attendees posted a re-enactment of the event to YouTube. Note: the mind map was done on a boat.

Growing Venture Solutions - GVS - Drupal Scout

GVS, Drupal Scout, acquired by industry leader Acquia

Plans for GVS brands

Plans for GVS team

Branding Exercise Leaves Fish Dead, Owl Satisfied, Drupalers sad