ECM Open Source Options, what's out there?

Hello, hello, hello is there anybody out there? as "Pink Floyd" would say in Comfortably Numb.

Well for a period of time we were all comfortably numb in the embrace of the multinational vendors as licence sales were pushed like logs into the ECM bonfire, but thankfully since 2000 we have seen the entrance of a couple of contenders into the ECM race that make things interesting. These two contenders in the ECM Open Source corner are Nuxeo and Alfresco.

So lets start with a Wikipedia snapshot of Nuxeo, founded in France 2000.

Nuxeo is a comprehensive free software / open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform. It has been designed to be robust, scalable and highly extensible, by using modern open source Java EE technologies, such as: the JCR, JSF, EJB3, JBoss Seam, OSGi, and a Service Oriented Approach. It can be used to develop both web-based server applications and Rich Client applications.

Also, according to the CMS Watch ECM Suites it is reported tha Nuxeo is a good mid range ECM player (mainly due to its current France and UK only penetration) that has strengths in it's client options, well designed workgroup collaboration tools and it's standards based repository compliance. To quote the CMS Watch ECM Suite on Nuxeo.

Nuxeo offers decent collaborative document management technologies, on a
technically quite open platform. Nuxeo is one of the better options currently
available particularly for its target market of government clients. Except for
Alfresco, it is the only open source ECM option that can be considered for
critical enterprise deployment.

quoted from the CMS Watch ECM Suites Report 2008

Nuxeo currently has over 1,000 deployments, all be it most of them on the older platform variant based on Zope/Python. Now version 5.x is based on a JAVA platform base. Nuxeo's own explanation of the switch to the JAVA platform choice is well documented here.

Next, into the arena comes Alfresco. 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, Mayfield Fund and SAP Ventures.

Alfresco, has certainly been somewhat the darling of the ECM circuit, due in part to the smart marketing expertise that the founders bring to gain visibility of the product. Again to quote from Wikipedia, here is a snapshot of Alfresco.

Alfresco is a free software / open source, open standards, enterprise scale content management system for Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems. Its
design is geared towards users who require a high degree of modularity and scalable performance. Alfresco includes a content repository, an out-of-the-box web portal framework for managing and using standard portal content, a CIFS interface that provides file system compatibility on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems, a web content management system capable of virtualizing webapps and static sites via Apache Tomcat, Lucene indexing, and jBPM workflow. The Alfresco system is developed using Java technology.

CMS Watch place Alfresco into the "ECM Suite" company category. I remember talking to Alan Pelz-Sharpe about Alfresco at the AIIM Conference in 2006 and have been keeping a watching brief on the product and the company since. In summary CMS Watch have this to say.

In sum, Alfresco is a high-end ECM development platform that happens to run on
an open source business model. As an ECM platform, Alfresco is scalable enough
to slug it out with the best of the competition in some high volume projects,
but at the application level it remains immature. If you are looking for
industry-specific, out-of-the-box solution, you may want to look elsewhere.

The interesting point that I see with Alfresco that it is in fact a commercial concern operating with an Open Source business model. So where is the money? Well there are two aspects. Ongoing service contracts. If you want the enterprise capabilities and resilience then you buy a services and support contact to get into the Network version of Alfresco. Secondly there has to be an IPO coming somewhere, or a possible buy out by a suitor.

As at November 2007 it was claimed by Alfresco’s CEO John Powell that there are now over 29,000 working installations/deployments of Alfresco around the world (50 countries, 20 languages). The dig was that it took IBM/FileNet over 25 years to get close to this number of installations, whereas Alfresco has done it in 2 years.

Here is a reference to Islinton and Alfresco in a previous post.

So a brief look at Nuxeo and Alfresco, some time soon I will look at a feature comparison of Nuxeo and Alfresco from a product and business fit perspective.

Consolidation musings and Open Source dark horses

Intersting to see that the rash of vendor consolidation continues unabated from the pre Xmas rush.

Microsoft puts out the stocking and stuffs in FAST. This is an interesting play in the battle of the Titans (read Microsoft and Google). But it is also an interesting play in the Search piece of the ECM Market. Love them or hate them Microsoft entered the ECM market big time with MOSS 2007 and from the vendor stands at the annual AIIM Conference they have made a big statement over the last couple of years. It has been commonly said that once Microsoft enters a market in three years they tend to dominate.

As I have talked internally in my own business for a couple of years consolidation is coming down to one to two serious horizontal platform players and the traditional ECM specialist companies are looking desperately as to how they are going to differentiate themselves or die.

Some like EMC have the pleasure or pain of being part of a wider super tanker company and therefore can balance out the software side of the business with the tin sales that are made year on year, but others are in a serious position of looking to get purchased or face getting squeezed in the process.

Now the dark horses are the Open Source players such as Alfresco and Nuxeo. While these guys may not feature on ye old "Gartner Magic Quadrant" they are really becoming quite serious in the capability that they can offer.

Alfresco has a serious line up of architectural power that comes out of the roots of Documentum and Interwoven. Having all the industry scars but not having to be encumbered with an Architecture that is now set, they have been able to re think and retool for the "new age". I have been watching them for awhile and now that they have records management in the offering it will be interesting to see the customer pick up in the "government" type clients.