After a long hiatus from blogging, I’m starting to get back into the ECM scene and I’m trying by doing a blog post daily for this entire week… But, since I’ve been so down on Alfresco for so long, I figured I’d take an in-depth look at them. Again, I’m not anti-Alfresco. I truly and honestly would love to see Alfresco take a good sized chunk of the ECM market away from other companies - and remember, there isn’t just Sharepoint out there as a competitor… I’ll be doing the same for Microsoft and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) here shortly as well and will hopefully be able to get my hands on a few other solutions soon. Lets see if I can get called names again by someone in England - where Alfresco happens to be headquartered…
Company Growth
Earlier in the year, Alfresco was awarded $9 Million in their Series C funding round bringing the total funding received around $19 Million. Not bad for an Open Source company that is still decently young. But I’m curious on how Sales have propped up their books and if they’re currently seeking funding. Only time will tell since no startup company would ever release this type of information. The more interesting piece of information is that the $9 Million from above came from SAP. In fact, there is an interview posted here where SAP officially talks about why Alfresco was invested in. The primary reason was the management team then it goes on to list several other key factors in the decision.
Alfresco has posted numerous jobs in various locations in the past and today is no exception. Listing 3 job types, one of which is a Technical Support Engineer which they nearly always advertise, employment looks to be normal. There was a lull a few months ago where they appeared to have slowed down their hiring process, but it seems they’re back to it.
Application News
Older news, but still worth note: In January 2008, reached the 100 Million Document mark with it’s Enterprise package, one has to wonder what is next on the benchmark news. SharePoint currently can hold a predicted 1 Billion documents across 20 Indexes. Are they going to continue reaching towards the 1 Billion mark? Of course, but notice that I said “predicted”… I can predict that Alfresco will make it to the 1 Billion mark as well, but I’m more interested to see how the Databases are handled when you get up near the 1+ Million range. Making a change-over from a Share Drive environment, like most of us have setup, to a ECM solution can be daunting task for any DB Admin.
Adobe has decided to use Alfresco for Acrobat.com usage.
Recently, however, Alfresco landed a large customer with an even larger external facing website,
Acrobat.com (
Press Release). Right now, the site lists as Beta and has a pretty slick Flash interface as well and I’m curious to see if its already running Alfresco. I would be crazy to ask for bigger player names in the game, but their
Customer List has some decent names in it already. Interestingly enough, the Adobe interface is so heavily customized via Air/Flash that it looks like a CMS solution that is completely Flash driven, but there really isn’t a way to tell. It’ll be interesting to watch the site over the next month or so to see how, or even if, it switches. The fact that it’s currently in Beta tells me that they are already using Alfresco with a heavily customized front-end. If so, this interface is something that all ECM Template Code Moneys should look at.
They’ve also won a few awards this year, but interestingly enough, the awards seemed to have slowed down from previous years. At this point, I truly think that it’s due to Alfresco being a more common name in the ECM scene, not because of lack of product. When it first hit the market, it was one of the more talked about Open Source Packages for awhile, now, the “chatter” has subsided.
Awhile ago, Alfresco also posted a Press Release that caught my attention: A GSA Contract schedule. For those outside the US Government, it means that Government entities (mostly Federal and Military) can purchase Alfresco without major difficulties or jumping through extra hoops requiring extra quotes and such. I’m a little concerned that it’s through a third party company and only valid for about 1.5 years, but as with any software, there is ramp up and testing time. It will allow those in the government to really get to know Alfresco a little easier.
On the note of Government purchases, I wanted to stress the fact that many government agencies - especially the military, wrongly distrust Open Source Software. Unfortunately, from what I have seen, it is purely due to ignorance of licensing and security concerns - OK, mostly security concerns. Anyone thats been in an environment where there is someone screaming that “OSS sucks because of X and Y” out of ignorance will understand. I’d love to go into more detail, but that mentality is what Alfresco is up against with regards to Government related IT purchases.
It’s Open Source, Right?
Sure, Alfresco maintains that it’s Open Source, but is it, really? For lack of a better word, Yes. Both versions, Lab and Enterprise, are 100% Open Source according to their website. Enterprise has specific licensing that makes it a for-cost, subscription based, service. “Labs” is maintained under the GPL, which restricts other companies from making improvements and calling it their own without giving back to the community.
On that note, one thing that has always stirred interest in Alfresco is their Open Source Barometer. For those that have never seen this, Alfresco makes a lot of their Survey data from customer trials and installs public showing what the Technical Sector is doing when they evaluate, test and use Open Source Software. It’s also worth quoting the survey response areas: “Open source has a geographic long tail, reflecting global demand fulfillment” – survey participants come from 200 countries – US 24%, EMEA 50% and ROW 26% Notice that “EMEA” leads the pack on respondents, this could mean two things, either the people in Europe, Middle East and Africa respond to more survey requests or there are more OSS installs going on here. For now, I’ll vote on the latter.
Sales
In the past, the Alfresco sales team really had problems giving a correct answer. Lets face it, I’ve hammered on them several times about this fact. Last time I emailed them, I received three different answers from three people then a fourth answer when I ran a story. None of the amounts agreed with each other.
Another issue I had was the fact that Alfresco wasn’t listing it’s pricing on it’s website. I would like to say it’s changed, but it hasn’t. At this point in time, you still need to contact Alfresco for a quote on the pricing scheme. Little did the know that I was watching when they released the RedHat link and pricing on it. The original page has been changed back to a “Contact Us” type sales page, but thankfully Archive.org has a copy of the page. I’m not going to quote it since it’s older data, but it still is interesting that they backed away from a public pricing scheme where Microsoft actually made it easier to find SharePoint pricing. Still a little disappointing, but at least they gave it a try before. I hate to take a stab in the dark, but it’s almost as if they want you to contact them so they can talk to you and attempt to answer any questions right there about the software. I’ve personally seen this type of situation go bad when a company gets desperate for customers and just about chases them away.
A True Quote
I haven’t officially contacted Alfresco’s sales department for awhile now. I have had no reason to bug their offices and waste their time. At this point though, I’m at a stage where I’m working for a different employer and there is a small interest in a CMS solution. I decided to email Alfresco’s Sales Dept again to get another email quote on the following configuration:
2 DB Servers (1 Production, 1 Testing) - both 4x Quad Core Xeon
2 Web Servers (1 Production, 1 Testing) -both 4x Quad Core Xeon
5000 User Connections Per Seat or 2000 Concurrent Connections if licensing allows
In the end, I received the following from their Sales dept. Again, this is a real-life situation where an employer is interested in a full blown CMS/ECM solution.
[Update: This is a little embarrassing. I posted the story before I actually received the quote. Oops on me. I'm pretty surprised that I haven't seen the quote yet (only 28 or so hours so far), but it's not unheard of for sales depts to run a little slow. I'm just hoping that they're not ignoring me... I'll post a new story with the quote information when I get it.]
SharePoint vs Alfresco Part….
Whats really interesting is that Alfresco completely dominates my blog for entry/exit pages, especially the past where I started to compare Alfresco and SharePoint. I wanted to stress that I didn’t forget or give up on the stories, but ran out of time and reliable hardware to run it (thus the server story). I’ve also been nagged/bugged/prodded/poked/nudged and politely asked by several folks via email to continue the story so that they can see a full side by side comparison. For that, I can say its coming - very soon. Unfortunately, when I setup my MOSS box, I completely forgot screen shots, so that’ll cause me to setup a new virtual machine. While I know SharePoint has become a little easier to install with MOSS coming out, I’m seriously excited to finally get to install Alfresco in an environment where it can shine. That story should be out in the next 2 or so weeks - I hope.
Preview of the Next Blog Post: Whats New With SharePoint 2007 (MOSS):
I just wrote about Alfresco, so I figured I should do the same for SharePoint, since Alfresco and SharePoint are considered direct competitors. SharePoint is also mentioned in a hust list of Press Releases from Alfresco.
