How difficult cancontent managementbe? Companies can
spend hundreds of thousands of pounds buying enterprise content
management (ECM) systems only to find they are unable to make full
use of the product. John Powell, chief executive officer of open
source ECM providerAlfresco
, believes there is a better way.
A former chief operating officer of business intelligence
software supplier
Business Objects,
Powell, along with John Newton, co-founder of ECM supplier
Documentum, started
Alfresco in 2005. The pair have hired a content management team of
core engineers from the cream of the ECM industry, including
Interwoven and Documentum.
Powell says Alfresco has been designed to enable end-users to
manage the deluge of content they acquire in their day-to-day job.
He dismisses existing ECM products as too complex and far too
expensive.
Alfresco is distributed as
open source, so the code is free but users have to pay for
support and maintenance. Making Alfresco available as open source
has been a benefit, according to Powell. "The open source community
has helped with quality assurance testing," he says. The community
has also helped with the development of device driver software. "We
are working with Ricoh so that
when you scan a document on a Ricoh copier, it is made instantly
available on the network."
Unlike commercial ECM tools. Alfresco has a simple model of
content sharing. It stores documents on a shared network drive so
there is no need for any special software. Alfresco's so-called
Intelligent Virtual File System is designed to be used as a shared
drive using
CIFS,
WebDAV or
FTP.
The product supports searching using Google-like search and
Yahoo-like folder browsing.
Alfresco also uses lightweight integration,
mash-ups and scripting to enable users to integrate the
application with their own systems. For instance, in a recent blog
posting, Alfresco chief architect Dave Caruana describes the
company's recently introduced Facebook integration platform. This
provides a way for Java developers to use Alfresco's Web Script
framework to build Facebook applications mainly using PHP in around
100 lines of code.
There have been more than one million downloads of Alfresco
throughout the world, more than 20,000 active deployments of the
product, and a customer base of more than 300 enterprise accounts,
including many Global 2000 organisations such as five of the top 10
investment banks. Electronic
Arts, H&R Block and
Dutch airline KLM run Alfresco in
enterprise-wide, mission-critical deployments.
UK users include British
Polythene Industries,
Camden Council,the Ministry of
Defence,
Reed Management Services and
Swansea Housing
Association.
Mike Davis, senior analyst at
Ovum, says, "[Alfresco] has the
technical capabilities, and along with Microsoft is likely to be
the most disruptive player in the ECM market at the enterprise
level in the next five years.
"Using open source components, Alfesco aims to put together a
lighter, faster and more ECM-comprehensive platform."
Davis points out that most ECM tools have been put together
through acquisition. For instance, OpenText bought Hummingbird, and
both Opentext and Hummingbird bought many companies to build their
own ECM platform.
But Davis thinks Alfresco is different. "Alfresco started with a
clean sheet, so there is no legacy stuff to support." Davis also
believes that since it uses the Tomcat open source application
server, Alfresco benefits from the open source community. "Using
open source means it is written to standards."
Davis believes the company has a good background, as many of its
key staff have come from Documentum. But despite the large number
of downloads, he says that Alfresco does not yet have
mission-critical deployements, which means potential users are
unlikely to find other companies who can show how the product
scales.
Last month Alfresco completed a $9m round of financing led by
SAP
Ventures. The company plans to use the proceeds to fund
continued growth into the ECM market, including product development
and acceleration of global expansion plans, particularly in the
German, US and Asian markets.
Powell says, "The funding will allow us to scale out and build
up our expertise." Over the next 12 months he hopes to build a
support organisation for customers and look at extending the
product into the hosted services market.