5 (Awkward) Acquia Engage Questions For Axelerant

Maybe you’ve got questions. And maybe you haven’t put these questions to us before because you want to be polite. Well, openness is a value of ours, so here the answers to some of the questions you might have wanted to ask but didn’t. It’s like a unFAQ.

And if we miss one, you let us know in the comments section.

1. Why is Axelerant sponsoring London?

A: Because Piyush's most favorite thing ever is a robust English Breakfast. (Lies.)

• But really, why Engage? Axelerant has been a close delivery partner since 2013, with 35+ enterprise-level engagements with affiliates. As the driving force behind Open Source digital experiences, Acquia has much to offer the ambitious. We’re proud to work with them and their agency partners and we believe the future is bright.
• So why Europe? We’ve regional presence here now (in Germany) and we’re growing. From our perspective, Europe is full of promise. We believe that regional continuity between the UK and the EU will remain, and that from north to south EMEA has some of the most interesting success stories with Acquia.
• And why now? With European presence now, years of enterprise-level delivery behind us, Acquia’s growth, and the recent acquisition of Mautic—it's time. We have something special to offer. Not the services of a cheap, garden variety offshore vendor: we are different.

We put care into employee satisfaction and customer success, and this makes us unique. Our competitive rates are powerful, and we’re not afraid to say that our dynamic engineering portfolio is the envy of many. (U.S. Quantcast Top 50s, Fortune 500s, Big Pharma, Ivy League Universities, WPP Group members, and more.

2. Isn’t Axelerant an “Indian” Company?

A: You mean: “How many Indians does it take to make a company ...Indian?”

We are a team of 70+ members now, operating across five countries: Germany, The United States, The United Arab Emirates, India, and Ethiopia. We consider ourselves to be global-first, not Indian. (Secret: we’ve just incorporated in Canada, with plans to build up our North American operations.)

Our agency started between Atlanta and Gurugram (that's outside of New Delhi). About 70-90% of our team members are working out of India at any given time. As a fully-distributed team, our employees can move and remain with us. And India as a country is vast and full of diversity, and those team members working from India are no exception.

As an example: English is our business language, but our people are prolific in French, German, Hindi, Bengali, Amharic, Arabic, Tamil, Malayalam, Urdu, Chinese and many others. At least two-dozen.

Speaking of diversity: we’re really proud of our leveling ratio between men and women. We’re striving for 40% of our agency’s engineering positions to be filled by women by the end of the year. We’re currently at +30% and with a long way to go until we’re 50/50, and maybe beyond that one day—why not? Excellence has no race, no gender.

3. Are you hunting business in Europe that should be going to regional agencies?

A: We’re the agency for these agencies, so doing this would make things really awkward.

Axelerant doesn’t sell direct with aggressive outbound campaigns that target end-clients. We partner with Acquia and other agency partners to deliver the work, 9/10. The only exception is if no agency relationships are currently in play, and if the interest comes through inbound with specific requirements.

If they’re currently working with an agency partner of ours, we inform the agency partner and turn the opportunity down. This has happened many times, and it’s one of the many reasons our partners trust us. We don’t poach.

4. Aren’t you just a “Drupal” shop?

A: It’s true that Drupal is our bread and butter, but at a high-level: think Kerrygold on toasted miche or shepherd loaf.

Decoupled Drupal for a U.S. Quantcast Top 50 is a pretty good example. But by the numbers, we’re more of an Acquia agency than we are Drupal agency. In terms of the sort of projects we’re currently delivering, and the products we work with (mostly Acquia Cloud Site Factory). Our competencies span across Development, DevOps, and QA. Our teams are big on Javascript, especially Angular, and we’re doubling down on Mautic capabilities.

5. Will you bother us on email or inMail?

A: Only if you don’t answer us the first time. Just kidding.

We’re not going to be emailing you or messaging every week on LinkedIn. That’s not how we roll. The truth is, as a global delivery partner we’re rowing upstream against a lot of negative “offshoring” or “outsourcing” perceptions and we’ve worked hard to overcome that. If you engage with our ads or if we’re already connected for a legitimate reason, we might reach out to say hello ahead of the event.

So what did we miss?

If you’ve any other questions—blunt or tempered—we’d be happy to answer them. Comment below or reach out to us and ask. We hope that you’ve found this helpful or at least mildly entertaining.

See you in London.