The software was free.

"Free is very disruptive," Batson said. "In a fragmented market, 'free' commands a lot of attention."

Batson's Andover company sells products, services, and technical support for Drupal, an open source software platform originally authored by company cofounder Dries Buytaert. Open source means it's built and maintained by a worldwide army of volunteer programmers, and unlike the pricey products offered by traditional software companies, is available for anybody to use at no cost. With Drupal, Acquia would be able to price its services without having to charge customers for any hefty software license fees.

It's a strategy that is gaining currency in a tight economy.

"Cost is definitely driving a lot of interest in open source," said Stephen Powers, an analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge. "It's a question I'm hearing all the time: Can we do this cheaper with open source?"

In a September 2008 survey conducted by Forrester Research, 56 percent of companies that use open source software named cost as the primary motivation. A survey by Framingham market intelligence firm IDC found that 10 to 24 percent of the software purchases made in 2008 by the companies it questioned went to open source, up from less than 10 percent in 2007.

Open source programs, which started to gain currency around the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, initially had difficulty attracting mainstream users because volunteer-maintained software was thought to be less reliable and less secure than products from blue chip technology providers like IBM and Microsoft. But over the past 10 years, as such open source programs as Apache, Linux, and MySql have been integrated into mainstream corporate technology settings, acceptance has steadily increased.

And now that the recession has focused attention on trimming costs, analysts like Forrester's Jeffrey S. Hammond are predicting a "second wave of open source software adoption."

"For open source software in general, it seems the bad economy is definitely good," said analyst Jay Lyman of the international technology consulting firm The 451 Group.

"Ironically, open source software has gone from something that was unknown and unfamiliar to something that is not only accepted, but is associated with cost savings."

Acquia is following a path blazed by companies such as enterprise software producer Novell Inc. in Waltham and Red Hat Inc. in Raleigh, N.C. Both companies are built on the Linux operating system, perhaps the best-known open source platform. Red Hat has grown to have 2,500 employees, 58 offices in 28 countries, and customers like the New York Stock Exchange and the Travel Channel. Information technology firm Novell serves clients including BMW, Wal-Mart, and Office Depot.

Launched in 2001 by Buytaert when he was a graduate student in Belgium, Drupal has attracted a large, fast-growing global community of thousands of developers and users. Like many open source projects, it has gained features as it has evolved, and powers high-profile websites for Sony Music, NASA, humor publisher The Onion, and the magazine Fast Company. The Obama administration's Recovery.org was built using Drupal.

This is not the first open source software-based company for Batson. He previously founded the telecom firm Pingtel in Woburn, basing it on an open source platform called SIP, and sold it in 2007.

In March, 2007, Batson took an exploratory trip to a DrupalCon conference hosted by Yahoo at its Sunnyvale, Calif., campus.

"I was stunned by the passion of these people," he said. "This was not just software, this was a movement."

Buytaert was approaching the end of his graduate studies and interested in making Drupal "the Linux of the Web." He and Batson raised $7 million in seed capital from North Bridge Venture Partners in Waltham, Sigma Partners in Boston, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures in San Francisco, and set up headquarters in a bland office park in Andover in January 2008. Now, 13 of Acquia's 35 employees work from far-flung locations; Budapest, New Delhi, Siberia, and Cologne, Germany. Buytaert still works from his home in Antwerp, Belgium.

Since the company's official launch in March 2008, the team has been working to make the casual, volunteer nature of Drupal palatable to more buttoned-down business customers, without losing the support of thousands less-corporate Drupal enthusiasts. According to CEO Thomas Erickson, scalability and security are the two biggest deliverables Acquia has to focus on now, but the agenda also includes making it easier to set up an Acquia site, as well as hundreds of enhancements, minor tweaks, and bug fixes.

The sheer number of tasks was apparent on a recent morning, as a cluster of engineers gathered for the daily "developers scrum." As they stood in a small conference room, surrounded by whiteboard walls and plate glass, the half-dozen staffers efficiently sorted tasks into categories like in progress, assigned, and done.

The sheer volume of problems, fixes, and enhancements on their list looked daunting, but Acquia is clearly hoping that the open source community of programmers will help.

"Because the Drupal community is so big, and so involved, we don't have to solve all those issues ourselves," said Douglas Hubler, the self-described scrum master who ran the session, after the meeting. "It gives us velocity," he added, "because in many cases, the information is out there, available. That's a big help."