This is more or less Alfresco’s third birthday. More or less because we started Alfresco in earnest in the new year as people were coming back from the holidays. Early 2005 was an exciting time, since we knew we wanted to create an open source enterprise content management system, but we didn’t know exactly who was going to buy it or how the open source model would work. With 2007 just completed, we have learned a lot and the future looks to be just as exciting as our first year. Alfresco is in its third year of exponential growth thanks to all of you who not only downloaded the software but deployed it in the tens of thousands of live systems and your active participation in the community.
Every company needs to start with table football.
L-R: Dave, Kev, Derek and Roy in early 2005
The year started by focusing on our community and nothing could have been more important than our decision to move to the GPL license from our previous modified MPL license. With this we made the entire system open source with an OSI approved license and decided not to withhold any features or bug fixes. We would encourage the community with full feature set and encourage enterprise customers with support and more testing and certification on different platforms, a model that most open source companies are adopting including MySQL and RedHat. CMO Ian Howells and his team are responsible for getting the world to know about Alfresco with a budget that is a tiny fraction of what anyone else in the ECM industry spends by building on an open source foundation and helping community development. Ian has hired Nancy Garrity as a community manager and we are in the process of revamping the whole community infrastructure. The result has been a dramatic growth in the community, over a hundred contributions, and our first user community meetings in New York and Paris.
Kevin Cochrane and Paul Holmes-Higgin presenting at the Paris User Conference
Our engineering group led by VP of Engineering Paul Holmes-Higgin and Chief Architect David Caruana, expanded functionality of our ECM capabilities while providing excellent support for customers and increasing robustness and scalability of the Alfresco system. During 2007, Kevin Cochrane, Britt Park and Jon Cox led the release of our web content management product, although almost all of engineering was involved in the WCM application, runtime or deployment services. WCM has already had a significant impact on the product, the community and our customer base. During 2007, Activision, EA Sports, Harvard Business School Publishing, Kaplan Educational Services and Swisscom launched internet websites on Alfresco. Web Scripts, the brainchild of Chief Architect David Caruana, uses REST as a web-oriented architecture to make it easy to create both mashable user interface components and new data APIs. Web Scripts enabled us to quickly create Microsoft Office extensions and integrate Alfresco into all sorts of environments such as Facebook and iGoogle as well as standard portals. The simplicity of web scripts has also led to a lot more contributions of new functionality to the community such as the new calendaring functions provided by the London Boroughs of Islington and Camden.
Dave Caruana's Facebook enhanced with Alfresco content thanks to Web Scripts
Enterprise sales and support grew dramatically and allow us to make the Alfresco system available free and open source. Matt Asay finds time between blogs on CNet to sell and hire the rapidly expanding US team. Denis Dorval, previously from FileNet, was promoted to VP of European sales and expanding a strong partner network here in Europe. The speed with which companies are adopting the enterprise system has surprised even us. I normally find out about and am surprised what new companies have bought an enterprise license during our end of quarter review. This meant that we added hundreds of paying customers in 2007 and Helen Dann has been furiously hiring both here in the UK and in Austin, Texas to support them. In addition our OEM business has been growing very strongly with more companies, such as Ricoh and Quark, incorporating either our lightweight repository or our CIFS capability with the newly GPL’ed JLan engine developed by Gary Spencer.
The coming year is shaping up to take Alfresco into the realm of greater collaboration and social computing as a natural extension of our Enterprise Content Management business. In 2008, we will be developing enhanced collaboration features, integrate Web 2.0 and social networking services into our applications, and take Alfresco services to the outside world as “Content as a Service”. The idea behind this is that ECM is no longer about application suites, but accessing and contributing content wherever it is needed, inside or outside the enterprise. Briana Wherry and her growing team are developing new documentation and training to help you learn more about these new and existing capabilities. We will be expanding our footprint into Europe with more support, marketing and sales in more countries and increasing the depth and breadth of experience in the US.
On this third birthday, I would like to thank all the people of Alfresco for their efforts who are now becoming to numerous to name. We are now getting close to seven times the number of people we had at the start. I would like to also thank all the people who have been active in the community and spreading the word about Alfresco and actively contributing to its success, especially people like Russ Danner, Jeff Potts and Ray Gauss. I would especially like to thank the original team that came together in that small room in Maidenhead in January 2005 - John Powell, Andy Hind, Dave Caruana, Derek Hulley, Gavin Cornwell, Kevin Roast, Linton Baddeley, Paul Holmes-Higgin, Roy Weatherall, and Steve Rigby. Thanks for believing.
Happy birthday to the Alfresco team. John - keep on leading - we're proud to follow.
Posted by: Michael Elia | 2008.01.15 at 12:24 PM
Wow, 3 years ?... somehow it seems longer. You've done a LOT in that short time. Best wishes for 2008.
Also, glad to see you're keeping the table-footie going. If you fancy an inter-company challenge let me know ;-)
Posted by: Tim Barker | 2008.01.13 at 04:46 PM
Happy New Year to all the Alfresco team, I hope you continue to go from strength to strength !
Posted by: Jed Cawthorne | 2008.01.05 at 08:57 PM
Congratulations John! It's been fun to watch Alfresco grow and thrive over the last three years.
Posted by: Chuck Tanowitz | 2008.01.05 at 01:57 PM