This really is the year where open source based corporations are stepping up in a fury of acquisitions and today it’s Acquia acquiring Cohesion to continue the drive of simplifying site and page creation.
What I find interesting in this purchase is that while WordPress vendors have been facing competition from the SaaS site firms, i.e. Wix, Weebly, etc, the Drupal sphere has been pretty quiet. I think that Acquia (think Automattic for Drupal) has come to the conclusion that to compete with an ever-growing WordPress ecosystem, that they need to have an equivalent inexpensive and reduced barrier-to-entry.
“Businesses need to launch, manage, and update their websites quicker and more efficiently than ever before,” said Dries Buytaert, Acquia co-founder, CTO, and chairman.
What we are seeing with a number of the acquisitions this year is that solution firms are focusing more on hosting (Automattic and Acquia) while the hosting companies (WP Engine, Pantheon, LiquidWeb) are focusing more on solutions. There are going to be some very interesting changes to the entire landscape next year. How does cPanel / Plesk fit into this future? Are we going to see WCMS distros on the horizon or industry funded forks?
I’ll be following these trends and postulating for quite some time!