In his blog, John Newton announced yesterday that Kevin Cochrane is leaving Alfresco. This was a bit of a shocker. If you’ve ever been to any sort of community event sponsored by Alfresco, chances are you’ve heard Kevin speak. In fact, if you’ve been involved at all in strategic discussions with Alfresco about product direction, you can attest to the passion an enthusiasm Kevin exudes when discussing Alfresco. Excitement alone would make him just a Marketing guy (no offense, my Marketing friends!), but Kevin added to that a sharp sense of direction for where Alfresco was headed and what users were looking for. That combination is what made him a good product manager, not just for Alfresco WCM, but really the entire platform. As John mentions, the product really wouldn’t be where it is today without Kevin’s drive.
It always seemed odd to me that Kevin, with his strong Interwoven background, was driving both the WCM and DM side of the platform. It seemed like a lot of scope to bite off, particularly with the potentially diverse set of use cases each provides. I guess The Two Johns agreed–they’ve decided to backfill Kevin with two resources: Mike Farman for ECM and Michael “Uzi” Uzquiano for WCM. Uzi earned recognition of late with the creation of the “next generation” web site framework which ultimately was adopted into 3.0 and incorporated into the plans for the new 3.0 web client, so he’s got the technical chops.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens next. Kevin’s is the latest departure from the Alfresco WCM ranks. A month or so ago two senior WCM engineers, Jon Cox and Britt Park, left. There seemed to be a bit more proactive damage control being done when Jon and Britt left, but I’m not going to read anything into that.
Alfresco has a lot of momentum right now with key clients going live on both the DM and WCM side of the house, impressive subscription revenue growth, and a good team to fill the void left by Kevin and Co. Provided the 3.0 release doesn’t slip too terribly far behind, I don’t think these departures are going to derail them.
Indeed it is a shocker, momentum is one thing but long term solid growth is another, without Kevin Alfreso has lost some of it’s soul and IMHO their future is not so bright. It IT it IS the people that make the product not the corporation.