Alfresco Software

Alfresco is the leading open source enterprise content management system built by the most experienced team in the industry drawn from Documentum®, Vignette® and Interwoven®. Twenty years of experience drove us to believe that the Enterprise Content Management industry was driven by:

• High Cost — Application driven purchases with a high up-front investment and per user pricing
• High Complexity — Long rollout cycles and complexity resulting in software either not being implemented or used
• Lack of Customer Control — Proprietary control preventing choice and ability to switch to other vendors

For these reasons the vast majority of people do not use ECM systems but instead work with shared drives and email to create, share and store content.

How Alfresco is Different

In the current economic climate organizations need to do more with less. Alfresco’s passion is to offer a solution that focuses on:

• Low Cost — A low cost, open source, subscription model with minimal upfront investment that can be driven out of operating expense (op ex) as opposed to capital expense (cap ex)
• Simplicity — Rapid deployment to deliver immediate business value and rapid application development using pre-built components and lightweight scripting

• Choice — Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by reusing existing hardware, software and skills. No lock-in to one ECM vendor or one stack, so when a vendor tries to dramatically increase maintenance fees you have a choice to go elsewhere

Alfresco was founded in 2005 by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects. Its investors include the investment firms SAP, Accel Partners and Mayfield Fund. The original technical staff consisted of principal engineers from Documentum, and Oracle. While Alfresco's product was initially focused on document management, in May 2006, it announced its intention to expand into web content management by acquiring senior technical and managerial staff from Interwoven; this included its VP of Web Content Management, two principal engineers, and a member of its user interface team. In 2007, Alfresco hired the principal sales engineer from Vignette.