Alfresco Teams Up with Red Hat Exchange (RHX)

Alfresco has been on the cutting-edge of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) since 1991, when I co-founded Documentum. In 2005, John Powell and I got together to bring the benefits of open source to the ECM market: better value, better performance, better ease-of-use, better flexibility and better software. Better content management and, as LinuxWorld Magazine recently wrote, content management that people will actually use.

Unlike some of our peers, our biggest problem has not been attracting Global 2000 interest. We have that in spades, with customers ranging from Electronic Arts to Boise Cascade to NASA to several of the world’s largest financial services companies.

No, our problem has been in effectively reaching the rest of the market, which arguably is a much greater opportunity: the small to medium-sized enterprises that can benefit from open source content management, but don’t necessarily know about Alfresco.

Enter RHX. RHX offers Alfresco an incredible channel to the SME market, with turnkey discovery, purchase and delivery of a tested, certified, fully integrated product with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the industry’s de facto choice for Linux. RHX is not just for SMEs, of course – we expect it to further drive Alfresco’s rapid growth into large enterprises, as well. The benefits of RHX apply to all – not merely smaller customers.

We view RHX as an excellent addition to our go-to-market strategy, and a superb value for customers. Enterprises have been buying into open source in ever-increasing amounts, and we don’t see that momentum slowing at all. See Forrester research here.

But one thing that will help to accelerate adoption is a service like RHX that streamlines the process of finding and implementing open source software, plus facilitates getting support post-sale. As for support, if it’s on RHX, you know that Red Hat – the most trusted brand in open source – stands behind it. There are customers that already have a relationship with Red Hat and will want to extend the value of that relationship to their ECM, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), etc. needs. With RHX, they can.

We’re very happy to be one of the original members of RHX. We expect great things from this Red Hat initiative, and look forward to this and other projects with Red Hat.

To learn more about Alfresco and RHX, visit here.

–John Newton, CTO & Co-Founder, Alfresco