Alfresco takes aim at content management monoliths

A BRITISH FIRM called Alfresco is using an open source model to take on giants of content management and document systems at the enterprise level.

John Powell, from Alfresco, said the firm is using an open source model to create what he hopes will become a global software company. He told the INQ that he has a corporate customer list of 300 plus firms that his competition would kill for.

The software itself is free, but Alfresco makes its money by adding services for its customers, rather like open source CRM firm, Sugar. It offers defined service level agreements, performance tuning, and engineering support around the product suites.

He claimed that content management customers had done a very bad job of implementing systems in firms on a large scale. He said the early systems, in the 1990s, were proprietary, written in obscure languages and using metadata in strange ways. The core apps for Alfresco, he said, were written in Java.

The firm's approach was to use open standards in a loose confederation way, rather than attempt to own the whole enterprise. Microsoft, he said, was unable philosophically to drag itself away from its monolithic approach, geared as it was to selling OS, site licences for SQL Server, and other Windows based products.

L'INQ
Alfresco