Demand for the open source Drupal CMS in the Asia Pacific has led Acquia to open an office in Sydney, headed by Chris Harrop.

The company – co-founded by Drupal’s creator in 2007 – is also extending the reach of its cloud-based service with two new cloud deployment options in Amazon Web Services’ Singapore and newly announced Australia data centres.

“As a result, Acquia is the first Drupal hosting provider to offer high-performance Drupal hosting on four continents: North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia,” says Harrop.

In addition to sales and business development staff, the new Sydney office will support Acquia’s cloud operations and technical support teams in the region.

Harrop, who is Acquia’s regional director for Asia Pacific, says the company is working with more than 60 digital agency partners to help organisations take full advantage of the system. “We’ve seen exponential growth in the adoption of Drupal as a web platform by global brands seeking to create a true unified web experience,” he says.

Acquia says the new data centres mean it will offer elastic, high-performance cloud hosting to its Australian and Asia-Pacific customers. “The centres will also expand our multi-region failover capabilities for global brands requiring global disaster recovery strategies,” Harrop says.