Alfresco
Reimagining Content Management

The evolution of business critical information and the way it is dispersed across the globe brings a new era of content and process management. The amount of information almost literally hovering “in the air” provided a basis for Alfresco, a leading provider of ECM and BPM solutions, re-imagining the world of content management. Taking the meaning of its name, its open source platform drives digital transformation and stays ahead of it in the virtual world of today by constantly moving forward in technology innovation, integration, and customization.

“The key is in four things: content, process, speed, and agility,” says Thomas DeMeo, Vice President of Product Management, Alfresco. With clientele comprising governments, multi-national organizations, and large financial institutions, the challenge of delivering business more efficiently, growing revenue, and cutting costs, while staying in compliance to avoid “getting in the headlines,” as DeMeo states, is something that most of them come to Alfresco with.

“It is really providing a company-wide platform for their mission-critical content. That is the crown jewel, so to speak.” DeMeo emphasizes the four key points to Alfresco’s flexibility to clients, especially CIOs facing budget restraints. “Alfresco’s open source and open core platform can run on a number of different operating systems and use a variety of databases. This choice and flexibility of controlling your own destiny is of high value to CIOs, especially when they had cases of getting stuck in one place after going all-in with a legacy vendor.”

Referencing partnerships with platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Bob Crissman, Vice President of Global Channel Sales, Alfresco, emphasizes the value of such flexibility among competition and an additional layer of high-level security, stating that “it makes it even more powerful. When you add AWS into the equation, it makes the time-to-market and time-to-value that much faster.” Alfresco has been supplying NASA for several years. “Imagine you have a spacecraft on a multi-year mission and all its data is stored inside of Alfresco,” adds DeMeo.

“Because they need to keep that information around, having Alfresco run on Amazon with a 60-year NASA retention policy is a great business to be in.”

Alfresco offers a comprehensive platform around content, process, and compliance services. “We don’t look at process and content separately, but as two sides of the same coin,” says DeMeo. Clients can gain efficiency around their content and make sure it is flowing to the right people at the right time—in a secure manner along with audit trails.

The key is in four things: content, process, speed, and agility

“We really have something that was purpose-built,” states DeMeo about ECM and BPM integration. Helping customers maximize the software’s value, Alfresco provides easy access to all content via open REST APIs, web and mobile apps, all with rich user experience. “Because we have an open core platform, mobilizing workforce globally, for example, is extremely easy because we’re giving our users the tools to configure the content and process and add any new information to meet their needs, as a valuable part of their workflow.”

Alfresco’s big exclamation point is the time-to-market and time-to-value. “It is much faster to build solutions with us and get your ideas on the market in weeks rather than years,” says Crissman. DeMeo concludes that “treating process, content, and apps as first-class citizens, having that in a rich application environment with modern technology, and flexibility makes the roadmap open to ready-made solutions to be delivered to our customers.”