Ryan Colas

Chief Revenue Officer Acquia

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Ryan Colas is Chief Revenue Officer of Acquia, where he owns global sales, presales, channel and revenue operations. Acquia is an unusual company to sell for: it was co-founded in 2007 by Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal, to give enterprises a commercial partner for software they could otherwise download for nothing, and its commercial proposition has always had to be about operating the platform rather than about owning the code. That means a revenue organisation built around large, long-cycle enterprise accounts, a substantial partner and systems-integrator channel — more than 700 partners against more than 4,500 customer organisations — and a product surface that has expanded well beyond content management into a full digital experience platform. It is also a private-equity-owned business, majority-held by Vista Equity Partners since 2019, which sets a particular operating tempo. Colas’s entire senior career has been in exactly that setting: he was chief revenue officer at Safeguard Global and at Community Brands, and vice president of sales at Social Solutions, all private-equity-backed software companies, after roughly a decade at ADP learning enterprise sales at scale.

Career Highlights

• Leads global sales, presales, channel and revenue operations at Acquia, focusing on a disciplined go-to-market motion and sustainable growth across the digital experience platform.
• Sits on an eight-person executive team under chief executive Chris Tranquill and executive chairman Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal.
• Reshaped Safeguard Global’s global go-to-market strategy as its chief revenue officer, strengthening alignment across teams and delivering growth.
• Served as chief revenue officer of Community Brands, a private-equity-backed association and nonprofit software group.
• Served as vice president of sales at Social Solutions, a software provider to social-service and nonprofit organisations.
• Spent approximately a decade at ADP in sales leadership roles spanning two business units.
• Brings more than fifteen years of experience building and scaling revenue organisations inside private-equity-backed software and technology companies, with stated specialisms in SaaS transformation, territory management, forecasting and pipeline management, and contract negotiation.

Professional Journey

Colas began his career at ADP, where he spent around a decade in sales leadership across two of the company’s business units. ADP is one of the enduring training grounds for enterprise sales in the United States — high activity volume, rigorous process discipline, and a product sold into every size of organisation — and a decade there is the kind of apprenticeship that produces operators who think in terms of coverage models and forecast accuracy rather than individual heroics.

He moved from that into private-equity-backed software, where he has stayed. At Social Solutions, which builds case-management software for social-service and nonprofit organisations, he was vice president of sales. He then became chief revenue officer of Community Brands, the group serving associations, nonprofits and schools — a business assembled substantially by acquisition, which makes the revenue leader’s job partly one of harmonising go-to-market across products that arrived with their own sales motions.

From there he took the chief revenue officer role at Safeguard Global, the employer-of-record and global payroll company, where his remit was to reshape the go-to-market strategy across a genuinely international footprint, tighten alignment between the revenue functions, and deliver growth. Selling employment infrastructure across dozens of jurisdictions is a different problem from selling a software licence, and the experience of running a globally distributed revenue organisation is directly relevant to Acquia’s own geographic spread.

He joined Acquia as chief revenue officer, taking responsibility for global sales, presales, channel and revenue operations. The emphasis he has stated for the role is on building a clear and disciplined go-to-market motion rather than on expansion for its own sake — consistent with a Vista-owned company where operational rigour is the governing expectation. He works alongside a chief market officer, a chief customer officer and a chief product and technology officer, under chief executive Chris Tranquill, with Dries Buytaert as executive chairman.

Education

James Madison University

Bachelor of Science, Kinesiology - Sport Management