Alfresco Professional and Enterprise Networks

As we transition to the new Hyland Community, some post links may be temporarily disrupted as we finalize redirects. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to resolve this as quickly as possible. Details.

paulhh

To the Alfresco Community:

We believe that enterprise document/ content management has moved from a 'nice to have' to a must have requirement for most organizations. A recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) and AIIM found that

- Over 50 percent of IT managers surveyed said that they are planning projects in e-mail, document control and records management in the next year- 15 percent of respondents were only slightly confident that their electronic records were accurate, accessible and trustworthy

However, the price of conventional proprietary ECM systems remains beyond the reach of many organizations, with even low end products costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also, the price of these systems has held back the development of many applications, unlike the structured data market where a wide choice of applications is available based on an open standards-based infrastructure.

Our goal was to:

- Create a product that would be free/low cost to small scale users and application developers and a real alternative to shared drives or Microsoft SharePoint(TM)- Create a product that would be a magnitude more cost effective for enterprise customers and a real open source alternative to Enterprise Content Management systems- An ECM system for partners to develop applications on that is as easy to embed as other leading open source systems such as JBoss and MySQL.

With your help we have now achieved these goals and this product release reflects our teamwork and the power of the open source community in creating a platform for scalable Enterprise Content Management.  We have a clear policy to make sure all of the certified contributions are fed into the open source product for the benefit of the community.

The Professional and Enterprise Networks we are announcing today are 10% of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of Closed Source Enterprise Content Management systems. These networks are backed by the services and skills to enable mass adoption by any organization, from those looking for small team collaboration to those with thousands of users in single or multi-server environments.

Details of these Networks and the benefits they bring can be found at http://www.alfrescosoftware.com

We thank you for your support and look forward to continuing this journey with you, quenching the world's thirst for Enterprise Content Management and changing the DNA of the software industry through open source.


John Powell, C.E.O.
Alfresco Software Inc

fselendic

Hmm, rather unpleasant, but quite expected surprise. I'm not sure that this model is what will work best for Alfresco and you guys in general (I am not a fan of "cripled" product based licensing), but, wht, it is your product to begin with, so I do wish you and your company best of luck.

I was unable to find pricing information on the site for a long time, you sholud perhaps move it from PDF to some more visible place.

Also, I can't find any info on partner programs and/or discounts, with this kind of new bussines agenda you are surely thinking of building a capable partner network.