Two days ago it was announced that pingVision has become an Acquia Platinum Partner.

I've heard Acquia described thusly as Redhat is to Linux, Acquia is to Drupal. Acquia offers commercially supported Drupal, "providing products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system."¹

Just as Redhat helped catapult Linux to the Enterprise level, Acquia is helping move Drupal into that space. With companies like Scripps Howard, Popsci, Sony, and Fast Company adopting the open-source package it is no wonder that services like Acquia's must enter the fray. Acquia was, in part, founded by Dries Buytaert the founder of Drupal and team lead for the Drupal Project.

The partner program is designed to reflect Acquia's confidence in an Acquia Drupal provider. The idea is that partner companies have the most talented and dedicated Drupal professionals in the industry.

Acquia Drupal comes pre-loaded with a number of vetted contributed modules to help jumpstart a Drupal project which include:

• Admin Menu
• Advanced Help
• CCK
• Fivestar
• Google Analytics
• Image and ImageCache
• Pathauto
• Printer, e-mail and PDF versions of pages
• Tagadelic
• Views

I'm pretty excited by this partnership.

¹From the Acquia Site.