For the fifth year in a row, Acquia has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms (DXP).

Acquia received this recognition from Gartner based on both the completeness of product vision and ability to execute.

Central to our vision and execution is a deep commitment to openness. Leveraging Drupal, Mautic and open APIs, we've built the most open DXP, empowering customers and partners to tailor our platform to their needs.

Our emphasis on openness extends to ensuring our solutions are accessible and inclusive, making them available to everyone. We also prioritize building trust through data security and compliance, integral to our philosophy of openness.

We're proud to be included in this report and thank our customers and partners for their support and collaboration.

For the fourth consecutive year, Acquia has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms (DXP).

Market recognition from Gartner on our product vision is exciting, because it aligns with what customers and partners are looking for in an open, composable DXP.

Acquia's strengths lie in its ties to Drupal, our open architecture, and its ability to take advantage of APIs to integrate with third-party applications.

Last year, I covered in detail what it means to be a Composable DXP.

Our leadership position improved compared to last year. Acquia is now the clear number two behind Adobe. Market validation from Gartner on our vision is exciting and encouraging.

In the report, the analysts note the Drupal community as a powerful entity that sets Acquia apart from closed-monoliths. Closed monolithic stacks and martech silos are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Drupal's scale, modularity and openness is a real differentiator.

In 2014, I declared that companies would need more than a website or a CMS to deliver great customer experiences. Instead, they would need a DXP that could integrate lots of different marketing and customer success technologies, and operate across more digital channels (e.g. mobile, chat, voice, and more).

For five years, Acquia has diligently been building towards an "open DXP". As part of that, we expanded our product portfolio with solutions like Lift (website personalization), and acquired two marketing companies: Mautic (marketing automation + email marketing), and AgilOne (Customer Data Platform).

Being named a Leader by Gartner in the Digital Experience Platforms Magic Quadrant validates years and years of hard work, including last year's acquisitions. We also join an amazing cohort of leaders, like Salesforce and Adobe, who are among the very best software companies in the world. All of this makes me incredibly proud of the Acquia team.

This recognition comes after six years as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management (WCM). We learned recently that Gartner is deprecating its Web Content Management Magic Quadrant as Gartner clients' demand has been shifting to the broader scope of DXPs. We also see growing interest in DXPs from our clients, though we believe WCM and content will continue to play a foundational and critical role.

You can read the full Gartner report on Acquia's website. Thank you to the entire Acquia team who made this incredible accomplishment possible!

As I've written before, I believe analyst reports like the Gartner Magic Quadrant are important because they introduce organizations to Acquia and Drupal. As I've put if before If you want to find a good coffee place, you use Yelp. If you want to find a nice hotel in New York, you use TripAdvisor. Similarly, if a CIO or CMO wants to spend $250,000 or more on enterprise software, they often consult an analyst firm like Gartner..

You can read the complete report on Acquia.com. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this result!

Update: Gartner asked me to take down this post, or to update it to follow their citation guidelines. Specifically, Gartner didn't want my commentary clouding their work. I updated this post to remove any personal commentary so my opinion is not blended with their report.

Analyst reports like the Gartner Magic Quadrant are important because they introduce organizations to Acquia and Drupal. Last year, I explained it in the following way: If you want to find a good coffee place, you use Yelp. If you want to find a nice hotel in New York, you use TripAdvisor. Similarly, if a CIO or CMO wants to spend $250,000 or more on enterprise software, they often consult an analyst firm like Gartner..

Our tenure as a top vendor is not only a strong endorsement of Acquia's strategy and vision, but also underscores our consistency. Drupal and Acquia are here to stay!

What I found interesting about this year's report is the increased emphasis on flexibility and ease of integration. I've been saying this for a few years now, but it's all about innovation through integration, rather than just innovation in the core platform itself.

Just look at the 2018 Martech 5000 – the supergraphic now includes 7,000 marketing technology solutions, which is a 27% increase from a year ago. This accelerated innovation isn't exclusive to marketing technology; its happening across every part of the enterprise technology stack. From headless commerce integrations to the growing adoption of JavaScript frameworks and emerging cross-channel experiences, organizations have the opportunity to re-imagine customer experiences like never before.

It's not surprising that customers are looking for an open platform that allows for open innovation and unlimited integrations. The best way to serve this need is through open APIs, decoupled architectures and an Open Source innovation model. This is why Drupal can offer its users thousands of integrations, more than all of the other Gartner leaders combined.

When you marry Drupal's community-driven innovation with Acquia's cloud platform and suite of marketing tools, you get an innovative solution across every layer of your technology stack. It allows our customers to bring powerful new experiences to market, across the web, mobile, native applications, chatbots and more. Most importantly, it gives customers the freedom to build on their own terms.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this result!

Early in my career I didn't fully understand or value the role of industry analysts like Gartner. Experience has taught me that strong analyst reports provide credibility and expose vendors to new markets and customers. It's easy to underestimate the importance of this kind of recognition for Acquia, and by extension for Drupal. If you're not familiar with the role of analyst firms, you can think of it this way: if you want to find a good coffee place, you use Yelp. If you want to find a nice hotel in New York, you use TripAdvisor. Similarly, if a CIO or CMO wants to spend $250,000 or more on enterprise software, they often consult an analyst firm like Gartner.

This year's report further cements Acquia's position as an industry leader as we received the highest marks for "Cloud Capability and Architecture". The report further highlights how Acquia enables our customers to use Drupal to the fullest extent. We enhance Drupal with services like Acquia Lift that empower organizations to not only meet the needs of their customers, but to be ambitious with digital. Today, a variety of organizations, ranging from DocuSign to the Tennessee Department of Tourism are using Acquia Lift to create significant value for their businesses.

In addition to tools like Acquia Lift, Gartner also highlighted the flexibility inherent to Acquia's platform. Acquia's emphasis on Open APIs, ranging from Drupal 8's API-first initiative to APIs for Acquia Cloud, Acquia Site Factory, and Acquia Lift, allows organizations to deliver critical capabilities faster and better integrated in their existing environments. For example, Wilson Sporting Goods delivers experiential commerce by marrying the abilities of Drupal and Magento, while Acquia supports Motorola's partnership with Demandware.

Our tenure as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management has enabled organizations across every industry to take a closer look at Acquia and Drupal. Organizations like Nasdaq, Pfizer, The City of Boston, and the YMCA continue to demonstrate the advantages of evolving their operating models with Drupal in comparison to our proprietary counterparts. Everyday, I get to witness firsthand how incredible and influential brands are shaping the world with Acquia and Drupal, and our standing in the Gartner Magic Quadrant reinforces that.

Organizations planning large WCM deployments rely on reports such as the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management to give them a comprehensive view of the competitive landscape. Acquia's strong placement will cause many organizations to give Drupal a closer look for their content management projects. Acquia is the only open source company included among the six leaders, and as CMSWire's Dom Nicastro reported, "Acquia made the biggest positive move" of all the solutions ranked in Gartner's report.

What I found especially interesting in this year's report was their observation that the WCM market is beginning to split in two subcategories: the first subcategory treats the web as an ever more important channel for marketing and communications; the second subcategory is focused on more profound digital transformations, where WCM is a strategic technology to create new business models and build new digital experiences.

Drupal is used for both. Johnson & Johnson, MillerCoors and Motorola are examples of brands that are creating digital experiences to support their marketing and communications. Look to the City of Boston's work to reimagine citizen engagement, or the innovation at Hubert Burda Media to transform the publishing industry for the next digital age as examples of the latter.

It's easy to underestimate the importance of this recognition for Acquia, and by extension for Drupal. If you want to find a good coffee place, you use Yelp. If you want to find a nice hotel in New York, you use TripAdvisor. Similarly, if a CIO wants to spend $250,000 or more on enterprise software, they consult an analyst firm like Gartner. So think of Gartner as "Yelp for the enterprise".

Many companies create their technology shortlist based on the leader quadrant. That means that Drupal has not been considered as an option for hundreds of evaluations for large projects that have taken place in the past couple of years. Being named a leader alongside companies like Adobe, HP, IBM, Oracle, and Sitecore will encourage more organizations to evaluate Drupal. More organizations evaluating Drupal should benefit the Drupal ecosystem and the development of Drupal.

The Gartner hype cycle is a model that posits five market stages for all emerging technologies. It looks like this:

Here is how I think the hype cycle's stages played out for Drupal 7's development cycle.

1. Technology Trigger. As Gartner puts it, this is where "A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off". For Drupal 7 that occurred when we started development on 4 February, 2008.
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations. This is a period when excitement about the forthcoming release makes people dream big. We entered this phase shortly before Drupal 7's release, as news of all the wonderful things we were doing entered the consciousness of early adopters.
3. Trough of Disillusionment. This stage came after Drupal 7's release, as people examined it closely to decide whether it would work for their new projects. Some discovered that a necessary module wasn't available yet, or that they had to learn some new APIs. Many chose "the devil they know" in Drupal 6 while cursing Drupal 7's differences. That's understandable, and it will pass.
4. Slope of Enlightenment. I believe this is where Drupal 7 is now. It is where modules are being upgraded, bugs are being fixed, and the whole ecosystem is becoming more stable overall. Some people adopt it, while others still wait.
5. Plateau of Productivity. This is where we can breathe easy. It occurs when developing in Drupal 6 seems pointless, because the Drupal 7 ecosystem exhibits more promise.

That last stage is where a product really shines. I think we reached the Plateau of Productivity for Drupal 6 sometime in late 2009, about 18 months after its release. At that point there was no advantage to developing in Drupal 5, and Drupal 7 was still a long way off.

I have my own opinions about Drupal 7's path through the hype cycle, but would like to hear your thoughts. When do you think Drupal 7 will reach the Plateau of Productivity?