Former Micro Focus exec joins Acquia as CEO

Michael Sullivan has joined Boston-based tech company Acquia as the company’s chief executive officer.

Prior to taking on the CEO role at Acquia, Sullivan oversaw the information management and governance product portfolio at Micro Focus. He joined Micro Focus when the company acquired HP Enterprise’s software arm.

Sullivan succeeds Tom Erickson, whose planned departure from Acquia was announced in May.

Acquia was co-founded by Dries Buytaert, who created the open source Drupal web platform. Buytaert is the company’s chief technology officer and Acquia revealed that in addition to retaining the CTO role, he has been appointed chairman.

“Mike is one of the most dynamic technology leaders I have met,” Buytaert said in a statement. “Like me, he founded a company in his twenties which he has led ever since. His deep understanding of the opportunities and challenges faced by large global enterprises aligns perfectly with Acquia’s focus on providing data-driven customer journey solutions to organizations that have ambitious digital aspirations and challenges.”

“Anyone with an ear to the ground of the Boston tech sector knows one of its brightest stars is Acquia,” Sullivan said. “The passion of the company’s 800 employees is unmistakable, and the opportunity we have to transform the customer experience is second to none

“Dries’ founding vision to pioneer cloud-based, open source content management has been proven over and over as Acquia delivered success to some of the world’s most innovative organizations. Acquia sits in the most exciting sector of today’s tech landscape.

“The company’s bold moves into data-driven customer journeys is the latest demonstration of the company’s intense focus on creating cloud solutions to solve the biggest challenges global organisations are facing today.”

Acquia recently embarked on what Buytaert has described as the next phase of its evolution, expanding the scope of its cloud services as it seeks to be the “universal platform” for enterprises to build digital experiences.

Acquia is “moving beyond Drupal” but not leaving the open source CMS behind, Buytaert told Computerworld earlier this year. In addition to managing Drupal-based sites, Acquia’s cloud platform can now be used to host and manage Node.js applications and instances of the Magento ecommerce platform.