After the announcement of Acquia’s acquisition of Mautic Inc., we’re sharing our immediate reaction in the form of an editorial. Here are our thoughts, explanations, and impressions as the second contributor to the Mautic community.
Prerequisites: distinguish Mautic and… Mautic!
Warning, the communication around this event is a bit clumsy: Acquia bought the company Mautic, which we can call Mautic Corp. or Mautic Inc. Buying Mautic doesn’t mean buying the community!
Indeed, the community and open-source project Mautic is run by a nonprofit association that cannot be acquired by a group with commercial ambitions. This makes it easy to answer the first questions that come up: no, in no way is this the end of open-source Mautic.
Who is Acquia?
Acquia is a commercial company specialized in selling open-source products in the cloud (or SaaS). More specifically, around the Drupal project. To date, this company is the primary contributor to the open-source CMS Drupal.
As a result, with around $200 million in revenue, this company has strong expertise in managing a community project, development, hosting, and Symfony as well—because Drupal also uses this framework (just like Mautic).
This acquisition—good news or not?
Yes, yes, and yes. It makes it possible to achieve several crucial things:
- Provide funds to Mautic Inc. following their fundraising round (Series A), which is starting to get a bit old. This gives Mautic fuel to keep investing efforts into the development of this open-source software. Since Mautic Inc. is the leading contributor to the project, we’re in a comfortable position to say that the main contributor is here to stay.
- Add additional expertise in managing an open-source project, development, and so on. Drupal is a success—there are good sources of inspiration. Especially since the convergence between the two projects is absolutely not a bad idea! With a good website/application and a good marketing automation tool, the magic is there.
And where does Webmecanik fit into all of this?
Just like before! We remain the second contributor to the open-source project after Mautic Corp., and above all, we keep taking care of our clients and the many partners/agencies that have trusted us for more than 4 years.
