Los Angeles Is Starting a Big Drupal Migration
Los Angeles City Hall trekandshoot / Shutterstock.com
City’s IT agency announced new contract to improve its Web infrastructure.
The nation’s second-largest city announced a major new contract on Thursday with Boston-based Acquia to help it migrate 20 different city websites to the Drupal content management system.
The city of Los Angeles’ Information Technology Agency selected Acquia’s Cloud Site Factory for the project, which aims to move the city’s public-facing websites from a legacy Oracle Stellent content management system to Drupal, the open-source CMS more and more governments are turning to.
Todd Akers, Acquia’s vice president of public sector, said in an interview with GovExec State & Local that Los Angeles was seeking a content platform that would offer greater scalability with improved connectivity to provide city services.
“The momentum of adoption of Drupal is significant as is the adoption of Acquia’s services in California as a whole,” Akers said. “When you look at what really drove things for L.A., they had some pretty clear objectives when it came to improving their digital presence for citizen services and they also decided that an open platform like Drupal, which lends itself to rapid innovation, was a key component in driving that decision.”
Ted Ross, the city’s assistant general manager for technology solutions, said in a statement that its Acquia contract “is letting us quickly scale our digital presence and increase citizen access to services, while ensuring a consistent experience for the City’s visitors.”
Acquia has worked previously on digital projects with other California local governments and agencies including the city of San Francisco, San Mateo County and the Bay Area Rapid Transit District.
The acceptance of Drupal as a local-government solution is certain improving, Akers said.
“When you look at organizations—the second largest city in the nation, L.A.; the state of New York has made a decision to standardize on the Acquia platform; all the federal agencies that are currently using our platform—the usual concerns of security, agility and resiliency are no longer there, which is why you’re seeing these massive organizations adopt our solutions.”
Other L.A.-area organizations have shifted their digital platforms to Drupal, too, including the Los Angeles Public Library, the L.A. Philharmonic and Visit Los Angeles.
(Image via trekandshoot/Shutterstock.com)
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