Software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Acquia has announced the appointment of Tom Cochran as vice president and chief digital strategist for the public sector business. Cochran was previously a deputy assistant secretary at the US Department of State.
Acquia is set to extend its open source offerings to the public sector using Cochran’s experience. The new appointment comes in the midst of some major open source developments by the US government and at a time when companies like Acquia are expand their public sector capabilities.
“Adding Tom Cochran to our public sector team will provide incredible insight and experience to our fast-growing and robust public sector business,” said Tom Erickson, Acquia CEO, in a statement. “We are proud to welcome an executive of Tom’s caliber to the team and have him lead the charge to continue making government and citizen services more open and accessible to all.”
Cochran was one of the executives behind the President’s Open Government Directive and was responsible for leading the delivery of the “We the People” online petitioning site. In is most recent position as the deputy assistant secretary, Cochran was responsible for the online and offline platforms for US public diplomacy that focuses on data-driven decisions and international audience engagements.
“The opening of government services has made incredible progress in the last eight years, and my focus at Acquia is to help governments at the federal, state, local as well as international level, to leverage Acquia’s open digital platform,” said Cochran.
Acquia is one of the leading open source companies around the world. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, the company offers technical support for web content management platform Drupal and provide enterprise-centric cloud solutions to various governments, institutions and organisations that include BBC, Stanford University and the Australian government.
