Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Drupal-based site management startup Pantheon now serves more than 1 billion web hits a month, an impressive milestone for a service that launched fully nine months ago.

As we’ve noted before, Pantheon wants to help companies get rid of their in-house content management systems and use Drupal instead. Pantheon bills itself as “Drupal-as-a-service” because it runs in the cloud and makes site management easier than if you had to run software on your own servers. Customers that use Pantheon include Chicago’s WBEZ (pictured), AAA, Alley Interactive, Stanford University Libraries, Kalamuna, USC Marshall School, and Big Switch Networks.

“We created Pantheon to liberate developers and companies from having to buy, run, and manage servers in order to bring their ideas to the web,” Pantheon CEO Zack Rosen said in a statement. “It’s been rewarding to see the number and diversity of companies that share that vision and are now using Pantheon, helping us reach this important milestone just a few months after our launch.”

On top of reaching the 1-billion-hits milestone, Pantheon has launched a new “Apollo Dashboard” to help its customers manage sites through a browser. Through the dashboard, developers can “deploy sites, create staging and testing environments, and manage code deployments” from one interface.

Pantheon offers a basic free plan for its service, with paid plans starting at $25 per month.

San Francisco-based Pantheon was founded in 2010 and has raised $6.3 million to date from investors including Foundry Group, Baseline, First Round, and Founders Collective.

But the White House is definitely not doing business — or government, rather — as usual. The U.S. government has released a repository of open source code that allows citizens to create and vote on petitions, the same functionality that drives WhiteHouse.gov.

In September 2011, President Barack Obama made this commitment:

Among our commitments, we’re launching a new online tool — called “We the People” — to allow Americans to directly petition the White House, and we’ll share that technology so any government in the world can enable its citizens to do the same.

Today the White House fulfilled that commitment, as a repository of source code was made public on Github. The web application allows users to create accounts, log in, set up petitions, and vote. Petitions only go public when they cross a designated number of voters, and future development plans include streamlining, API development, a mobile version, and social media integration.

Interestingly, the developers and, presumably, the government chose the GNU General Public License, which Richard Stallman, long a proponent of completely free software, would approve. The GPL grants anyone the rights to use, study, modify, and redistribute software, which is one of the reasons Microsoft argued it was anti-American.

The application, titled Petition, is built on the Drupal content management system, and requires MySQL, MongoDB, and, naturally, PHP. Petition is in alpha, which is a very early stage of software development, but is currently in use already at whitehouse.gov.

Open source: You’ve come a long way, baby.

Image credit: White House/ShutterStock

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Drupal-based content management startup Pantheon has raised a $5 million first round of funding from Foundry Group and a few others to help move enterprise website management to the cloud, the company announced today.

As we’ve written before, Pantheon wants to help companies get rid of their in-house content management systems and use Drupal instead. Pantheon CEO Zack Rosen told VentureBeat that Drupal is more powerful than WordPress and more useful for enterprise-grade websites.

What makes this offering different from the open-source Drupal client is that Pantheon runs as a software-as-a-service instead of running on your own servers. Pantheon’s “Drupal-as-a-service” is built on top of Rackspace’s cloud, but Rosen said his service is “infrastructure agnostic.”

“The majority of the market doesn’t have a real CMS yet,” Rosen said. “These companies should adopt a web-based CMS that is delivered as a ‘software-as-a-service.’ Companies don’t want to deal with servers these days.”

The new $5 million round was led by Foundry Group, with participation by prior investors Baseline, First Round, and Founders Collective. This brings the total amount Pantheon has raised to $6.3 million.

San Francisco-based Pantheon was founded in 2010 and now has 13 employees. Rosen said the company has “hundreds of customers,” including NBC Universal, University of California-Berkeley, and AAA.

Watch Pantheon’s latest video below for more:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Pantheon, a content management service provider for enterprises, has officially launched out of beta and is now focused on helping customers move their site management tools completely to the cloud.

“Pantheon gives you enterprise-class tools with the ease of a consumer site like Twitter or Tumblr.” Pantheon CEO Zack Rosen told VentureBeat. “It runs fast, it’s always on and there’s no need to buy servers or hire IT for content management and hosting.”

Pantheon offers a cloud-based and easy-to-use website content management service that targets sites using Drupal‘s open-source software. The company makes it possible for clients to develop, host and manage their sites all using Pantheon. Enterprises that need more powerful site management tools than WordPress, which runs on 15 percent of the web’s highest trafficked sites, will likely appreciate Pantheon.

“WordPress is wonderful if you’re a blog or have a small business site with a limited number of pages, but it isn’t suited for big enterprise sites,” Rosen said.

Pantheon runs on top of the Rackspace Cloud for its back end. Rosen said the company has 50 paying customers right now. Some prominent clients Pantheon has already signed up include NBC Universal, University of California-Berkeley and AAA.

Two sites Rosen spotlighted as Pantheon customers right now are The Fix and the UN’s Global Pulse, a site that went from inception to launch using Pantheon’s management system in just four weeks.

Pantheon package pricing starts at $100 per month, and that cost escalates as an organization’s site needs increase. Rosen said the company will “have a cheaper offering soon.”

San Francisco-based Pantheon raised $1.3 million about a year ago from the likes of First Round Capital, Baseline, Floodgate and Founder Collective. Pantheon has eight employees but Rosen said the company is hiring now to expand its team.

A video demo of Pantheon’s service can be viewed below:

http://vimeo.com/29063619