Alfresco was founded in 2005 by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects . Its investors include the leading investment firms Accel Partners and Mayfield Fund.

Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. It couples the innovation of open source with the stability of a true enterprise-class platform. The open source model allows Alfresco to use best-of-breed open source technologies and contributions from the open source community to get higher quality software produced more quickly at much lower cost.

Alfresco is unique in that it is:

• Open – Open Source, Open Standards.
• Source – Best-of-Breed Open Source Components.
• Enterprise – Enterprise-Scale, Enterprise-Infrastructure, Enterprise-Control.
• Content – Documents, records, Web Pages, Images, Rich Media.
• Management – Most Experienced Team in Content Management in the World from Documentum and Interwoven.

Alfresco’s goal is to not only provide an open source offering but to surpass commercial offerings such as Documentum or Microsoft SharePoint in terms of features, functionality and benefits to the user community.

As Kyle McNabb, Principal Analyst at Forrester, notes: “Alfresco continues to demonstrate a bit more leading edge thinking in the world of ECM than their commercial counterparts IBM, EMC, Oracle, and Open Text.””

Alfresco’s global headquarters are in the UK. Its North American headquarters are in Palo Alto, California.

Alfresco Key Strengths

• Alfresco is built by a team of original leading members from Documentum and Interwoven with 15 years experience in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), including the co-founder of Documentum. The track record of the Alfresco team has enabled Alfresco to rapidly become the leading open source enterprise content management system./li>
• Alfresco has emerged over the past three years with a completely new approach to content management that is user friendly, familiar, and highly affordable. Over one million people have downloaded Alfresco software and the active deployments of Alfresco have exceeded 30,000 worldwide.
• In May 2008 Alfresco Software announced the release of Alfresco Enterprise 2.2, which in particular is designed to power Web 2.0 properties and online communities. New feature enhancements support the creation, deployment and update of scalable Web 2.0 sites that can be developed using any web application language.
• The benefits of using Alfresco include ease-of-use through the deployment of an Intelligent Virtual File System, and Google-Like Search and Yahoo!-Like folder browsing.
• Focused on ease-of-use, Alfresco’s Surf platform enables the rapid creation of next-generation, productivity-focused web applications designed to deliver your content to web sites and web users. The company’s solution is built on a lightweight web application construction and delivery platform that brings the power of Alfresco web scripting into the presentation tier.
• In the current economic climate organizations are seeking to do more with less. Alfresco’s mission is to offer a low cost, open source, subscription model with minimal upfront investment which ensures dramatically lower TCO than comparable proprietary solutions.
• In 2008 Alfresco announced that it has won the “Next Gem Award” at the third annual awards ceremony hosted by world-renowned luxury watchmaker Audemars Piguet & Cie, in partnership with the European Tech Tour Association and Schroder & Co Banque. The “Next Gem Award” category celebrates young, emerging European technology companies that have demonstrated an ability to bring a unique and original concept to the fore. The award is designed to recognize the achievements and the innovation of the recipient company.