I was at AIIM Expo, the largest content management show in the world, last week since I was giving a presentation at the conference on Open Source and Enterprise Content Management. It is unfortunate that both JavaOne and AIIM were at the same time this year, but Kevin Cochrane has JavaOne well covered where things went very well.
My presentation followed a presentation on the Future of ECM, which was a panel session with EMC|Documentum, Oracle and Microsoft and moderated by Russ Stalters. This session was well attended and at capacity in the room. Some of the themes discussed were consolidation of the ECM space around major infrastructure players, open source and new technologies like automatic classification. Since the ECM industry is just now being affected by open source and so it didn't come up naturally, but Russ Stalters asked the question since he is aware of Alfresco. Lubor Ptacek from EMC muttered something about the open source solutions not being complete. Rich Buchheim from Oracle said that open source is okay for small businesses, although he really knows that isn't true (right Rich? ;-) ). The Microsoft guy waffled on something about Google and their hosted office documents, but he did make a joke about saying that he probably isn't qualified to comment since he is from Microsoft.
My presentation was almost as well attended as the Future of ECM. There seems to be as much interest in open source as there is in the future of ECM. The subject matter that I covered was about how open source was going to affect ECM. I covered the history of ECM from my perspective over the last 15 - 20 years, the power that open source is having over enterprise software in general, and the specific affects that open source will have on ECM in the future. You can down load my presentation here. Munwar Shariff from our partner Cignex took some pictures of the session.
At the Expo, our booth has to have got to win an award -- for least pretentious and best home construction project. Compared to the multi-million dollar monstrosities of EMC, IBM, Filenet, Kodak, Xerox, etc., I think we only spent a couple of hundred dollars on it. At least you know that our money is going on product rather than fancy marketing. But because we were near the bathrooms, we got pretty good traffic. We got some fantastic leads and keen interest from our attendance. Luis Sala and Martin Musierowicz diligently manned the booth supported by eCopy who was demonstrating integration of scanning with Alfresco. The scanning solution impressed a lot of the system integrators. Cygnex's booth was right across from ours where they were presenting Alfresco training and consulting services.
It was an extremely productive show for us. We got good exposure in the conference, great leads from large corporations, medium size businesses and system integrators. Since all partners meet in one place, it is also a great place to network. In my next post, I will talk about the activities that went on around AIIM iECM.
Things went equally well at Java One for Kevin Cochrane and Jason Hardin. Kevin reported:
- We were the right product at the right time at this show. We captured much of the excitement and buzz building here at JavaOne. People we saw on Day One talked about Alfresco and brought a portion of our traffic on Day Two and much of our traffic on Day Three.
- 100% open source and charging for support and maintanence right on the money. People loved the model (and yes, nearly all - except maybe two - thought people would be crazy not to buy maintanence).
- JSR-170 support HUGE. It was a point of significant interest. This only reinforced that we must be the best implementation of JSR-170 around.
- People need something simpler than DCTM that is not Sharepoint. We are hitting the mark here.
- Our current capabilities hit the mark for the majority of expressed needs, and our plans for WCM fill in any and all outliers (very strong need for those with complex web requirements for the versioning capabilities, etc. we are now building for our upcoming release).
Here is a picture of Jason at our booth at the Java One show
