GigaOM

Acquia, a North Andover, Mass.-based startup, is announcing a supported product using Drupal, the open-source content managment system that underlies many of the community aspects on the web, from sites such as Fast Company to The Onion. It’s a rite of passage for an open-source project to get its very own shepherd that provides a measure of support beyond the forums and masses of independent programmers who churn out the code. For Drupal, the move is akin to Red Hat offering support for Linux and Sun taking MySQL under its wing for $1 billion.

Acquia has hired Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, as its CTO; it scored $7 million back in December to build its 12-person team to this point. Jeff Whatcott, the VP of marketing for Acquia, says the company wants to continue to contribute to the Drupal code base and has no plans to create a proprietary form of code for enterprise use.

Acquia has readied some modules targeted at specific enterprise markets and will sell subscriptions to Acquia’s Drupal add-ons as well as services that support new and existing Drupal deployments. The Acquia-supported Drupal product is called Carbon, and will be ready in the second half of this year. An automatic update service for Carbon called Spokes will be available then as well.