Acquia has announced the appointment of Christopher Stone as senior vice president of products and development. Stone has more than 30 years of experience in software development and pioneering open source solutions for the enterprise. Stone will be responsible for engineering, DevOps, and product management of the Acquia Platform, helping lead the expansion of the company’s suite of SaaS solutions for building and managing integrated digital experiences.
Over the years, Stone has been quite involved with the Linux, open source, and technology community. With Eric Schmidt, Stone was part of Novell’s 1990s turnaround during his tenure as executive vice president of corporate development, and later served as Novell’s vice-chairman and co-CEO. Stone founded Tilion, a pioneer in cloud computing. He also started the Object Management Group, which innovated the concept of Object Oriented computing (a standard called CORBA) within distributed systems. Most recently, Stone was a managing director of Epic Ventures, an early-stage software and Internet infrastructure venture firm. Previously he was CEO of SiCortex, maker of high-performance Linux computers, and StreamServe, a European-based document management company that was acquired by OpenText.
Acquia reports that Stone will help set the roadmap and strategy for Acquia’s platform and SaaS solutions for uniting content, community and commerce, streamlining the product experience for Acquia customers and leading the company’s product development. In 2014, Acquia introduced Site Factory for managing hundreds of sites, Campaign Cloud for digital agencies, and Lift for testing and targeting the delivery of context-aware experiences.
“Fragmented experiences are costly to maintain and result in a poor customer experience. The ability to unify content, community and commerce can make or break a business, and Acquia is the only company that’s helping make this integration happen,” Stone said. “From Acquia’s secure, resilient cloud platform to our vision for contextualized engagement, Acquia is leading digital transformation for Global 2000 organizations. I'm incredibly excited to be here.”
“Chris brings invaluable experience to Acquia, from the early days of service-oriented architecture through his success in leading global software companies to enormous growth,” said Tom Erickson, Acquia CEO. “He’s a tremendous asset to our strong leadership team, which is committed to helping brands lower costs, speed their time to market, and improve service through contextually relevant, integrated digital experiences.”
Source: Acquia News Release