Some local news concerning a bunch of my friends. Vancouver web development house Raincity Studios is acquiring Vancouver Drupal community hosting hub Bryght. From the press release (possibly the first–to their credit–that either company has ever issued?):
The deal took flight while Scales and Kris Krug, now-former-President of Bryght, were in China scouting a new office location in Shanghai when they decided their companies’ complementary services could be enhanced by joining forces. Krug, the newly appointed President of the new company, saw the growth potential saying, “By joining Raincity Studios, we can capture market leadership by responding quickly to the unmet demand for Drupal development services worldwide while also offering an increased service roster to our existing growing client base.”
Er, Kris sounds a little formal there, so I sent over some questions:
Will there be any staff changes? That is, is anybody leaving?
No one is leaving. We’re hiring. Several positions including a sysadmin here in Vancouver and several positions in Shanghai.. mostly developers and software engineers.
How will the expanded Raincity org chart be structured?
Scales will CEO and GM of Asia. I’ll be President and GM of North America. Boris will be the Director of Product Managment… bring new turnkey hosted solutions to market.
Mark will stay creative director. Eric will stay production director. We’re going to buff up a Support and Services division that will be run by Alex Rollin. Djun Kim with be R & D director.
How does this change the kind of clients Raincity can go after?
Our biggest clients like Warner Brothers and Sony want more from us than we’re able to give. It’s why we’re expanding to China and growing. We’ll be better able to service the biggest clients and projects and have a lot more resources at our disposal. Essentially we’ll be better in a position to turn away the small or bad jobs.
A recurring theme of Bryght seemed to be “we don’t want to be a design firm”. Why the change of heart?
No change of heart. Our guys will still focus on all the infrastructure/Drupal stuff. RCS guys will focus on the design stuff. We’re moving up market… our clients want it all. Strategy, design, development, marketing, training and support. Now we can give it to them end to end. [Ed: In the interests of good taste, I excised Kris’s smirking emoticon]
Will this halve the number of social media-based parties and events in Vancouver? That’d be tragic.
Maybe but they’ll be three times as good.
Good luck to the newly expanded and correctly spelled Raincity!
In unrelated news, I noticed that Dooce, one of the world’s most popular blogs, recently switched to Drupal.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Many of us who know the Bryght and Raincity folks thought of them as a big sort of meta-organization before anyway (my first thought was, “What? Oh yeah, I guess they *weren’t* the same company”), so it doesn’t appear a big change to me.
Actually, they were kind of like symbiotic species in the same ecosystem.
But that’s as far as I’d like to take the metaphor, because I’m pretty sure the merger would end with slime mold… and these folks are vastly more evolved than that. (Insert smirking emoticon here.)
I’ve found the Web 2.0 sector is full of ecosystems like that, actually — where the borders among collaborative partners are just a little blurry. It’s a little like industrial clustering, only even more intimate and porous. (Insert smirking emoticon here, too.)
thanks rob and derek!
meta++ 🙂 !