Fresh off a new round of financing, open source content management (CMS) vendor Acquia is putting its new funds to work in taking the Drupal open source CMS to new heights in the enterprise.

For Acquia, Drupal's lead commercial sponsor, a new influx of $8 million last month will help fuel the engineering behind the upcoming Drupal 7 release, which is intended to help make the software more attractive to enterprise CMS users.

The money -- which follows $7 million Acquia raised in March 2008 -- will also help the company build a Drupal 7-powered, cloud-based service model, codenamed "Acquia Gardens".

"It's basically Drupal as a service, so that anyone can easily put up their own site online quickly," Acquia CEO Tom Erickson told InternetNews.com. "As a part of that, we're doing a lot of work with the new release of Drupal, Drupal 7, to improve its usability, and that's something we'll use the money for."

Both plans aim to raise Drupal, currently at version 6.13, to the next level in both technology and popularity. The software now claims more than 400,000 active sites, according to Acquia. There have also been some 60,000 downloads of Acquia's distribution of Drupal, which includes additional modules on top of the base CMS system.

The goal now is for Acquia to expand that reach even further with a focus on the administration side of things in Drupal 7.

"An enterprise customer will be able to come in, and in a much easier fashion, be able to administer the rollout of multiple sites," he said. "Drupal has been a developer product for years, and now we realize that we're going to be going out to the enterprise -- to lots of non-technical types of people -- and not everyone will be as keen on being a developer."

Drupal 7 is currently set for a code freeze in September, and Erickson said he expects a final version three to five months afterward.

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That doesn't mean that Drupal 7-based technology won't be available sooner, however. Erickson said the company plans to release Acquia Gardens ahead of Drupal 7 to showcase the software's capabilities.

Commercializing Drupal

The plans mark the latest for year-old Acquia, which debuted as a commercial entity in March 2008 to support enterprise adoption of Drupal.

Erickson joined the company in March 2009 with the goal of expanding Acquia's partnership base and growing the business. In March, Erickson told InternetNews.com that he expected Acquia to be cash-flow positive by mid-2010 -- a forecast that he's still sticking with.

Part of Erickson's model for growth is to partner with existing Drupal shops.

"I think a lot of the Drupal organizations are good design and implementation shops, where they do their projects and then move on," Erickson said. "The Acquia focus is about sustained relationships over a period of time, similar to an enterprise software company. What we've done to manage relationships is we've done joint marketing with partners."

Overcoming hurdles

Yet Drupal also faces a few barriers to adoption. Among them is what Erickson called a "mentality" issue, where potential customers are reluctant to explore a solution different than what they're used to.

There are also some enterprise features that users currently may find lacking in Drupal, he said.

"Drupal is not well known for its workflow," Erickson said. "We expect that Acquia, over the next 18 months as we finish rolling out our new products, will be working to add some of that value."

In the meantime, Acquia doesn't see a need to focus on winning business from the vendors of proprietary CMS applications. While it's willing to promote partners who concentrate on migrating users to Drupal from other commercial CMS applications, Acquia instead sees itself being able to rely on the open source CMS's already large base of users.

"The majority of our customers to date are expanding Drupal usage," Erickson said. "They're familiar with Drupal and they want more of it."