Salvatore Genovese

Alfresco Software of open source enterprise content management (ECM) launched its Cloud Content Application Developer Program. Alfresco will provide an open source Amazon EC2-ready stack and developer kit for customers and partners to develop, deploy and monetize cloud service architecture (CSA) content applications on the EC2 platform.

Managing content effectively at a low cost while adhering to regulatory controls has become an indispensible part of running an efficient business. According to the study “Above the Clouds: a Berkley View of Cloud Computing,” the cost is one-fifth to one-seventh of that offered to a medium sized data center. Alfresco is designed to take full advantage of a cloud service architecture and deliver cost-effective high availability and scalability. Alfresco is portable across internal and external clouds through the use of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. Those organizations wishing to use secure, but shared data models also have the option of deploying multi-tenant solutions, offering compliant access between multiple legal entities.

“Content growth requires a sophisticated ECM solution that can scale users and content volumes simply and at low cost without massive up-front capital expenditure. Alfresco today has customers in the cloud with millions of users, terabytes of data and hundreds of millions of documents,” commented John Powell, CEO, Alfresco Software. “Legacy applications may run in the cloud, but modern content service approaches consuming services resident in the same cloud are required to inherit the full benefits of a cloud service architecture. Only then can enterprises and governments achieve the cost efficiencies of on-demand scalability, fault tolerance and cloud-wide network security for documents, records and collaboration.”

The Alfresco Cloud Developer Program offers partners “early adopter” advantages to deliver cloud-ready content applications for collaboration, document and records management. Alfresco will also offer a subscription for those requiring expert Enterprise 24/7 support.