Adrian is officially on the team : ). As the father of Aegir (the future of large Drupal deployments and management) and a long time Drupal community member, Adrian is an obvious complement to our team. He has built everything from Drupal’s Forms API to PHP template, and he designed the installer profile system. He also co-founded Bryght, one of the first companies to base its entire business model on Drupal and an amazing team that I always admired.

To a lot of people this is not surprising news. We’ve been looking at Aegir for about a year (back when it was called HostMaster2) in the context of supporting Managing News. Adrian has done an amazing job of advancing the project and building a base around Aegir, particularly in building an active group with daily scrum sessions: Monday through Friday at 16:00GMT, Weekly development meetings: Fridays at 16:00GMT, and a persistent #aegir on irc.freenode.net. This energy is only the most recent example of Adrian’s passion that I have seen over the years since Jeff and I first met him at DrupalCon Vancouver, walking to a bar with webchick.

But we see Aegir as being beneficial to us well beyond what it could do for Managing News and our intranet, 8Trees. This is a toolset that will help us manage the sites we are running and that will better enable us to help our clients run more sustainable operations. Depending on how quickly Adrian is able to get a .2 release of Aegir out the door and how we can integrate Aegir into a package that we can pass to our clients, there’s a good chance we’ll have Aegir in production environments for large international development agencies before the summer. Our dreams of building prefab distros for USAID’s knowledge management/data collection/brochure-ware that run entirely on Drupal and can be turned on in the hundreds are closer to being a reality.

Adrian is also a bigger deal to us than just Aegir. He will work closely on Context and Spaces (there is great overlap here with feature provisioning), assist with strengthening backend systems that need to scale for larger projects like Managing News, and work with all of us to identify new opportunities to build creative communications tools and technical solutions in designated projects.

You can read more about Aegir at http://code.developmentseed.org/aegir and more about Adrian at http://code.developmentseed.org/space-adrian-rossouw.