Alfresco launches in UK

Alfresco, the open-source enterprise content management company, has opened an office in the UK, and it has plans to expand rapidly.

According to John Newton, chief technology officer of Alfresco, and previously the co-founder of Documentum, Alfresco now has 300 paying customers, 12,000 active installations and provides 600,000 downloads a week. "We are building up momentum," he said. "Of those 300 customers, 100 were added in the last quarter."

Newton makes no secret of the fact that Alfresco's ambition is to do for enterprise content management (ECM) what Salesforce.com did for CRM. "We looked for a gap in the market and we could see that open source was the way to go, and that we had MySQL and JBoss and Linux, but no-one was doing ECM," he said.

The company was created in 2005 and landed Reed Managed Services, a group of the employment company, as one of its first customers in the UK.

Now it has added Swansea Housing Association, the MoD Defence Academy and Amnesty International, among others. The company claims its software is "five times faster and 10 times cheaper than its traditional proprietary counterparts".

On Thursday, the company also revealed the Open Source Barometer, which it hopes will be a biannual research initiative on open-source adoption trends. So far the company says it has 10,000 responses to the survey, making it one of the largest of its kind. Respondents were asked to report their usage of operating systems, application servers, databases and portals, whether open source or proprietary.

According to the figures, the top five open-source adopters are the US, France, Spain, Germany and Italy. The UK only managed sixth place.

Alfresco's UK base is in Maidenhead, in the Thames Valley, and it already has sales operations in Germany, France, Benelux and Spain.