Interesting news today in the Alfresco world. The software vendor has acquired Technology Services Group, a Chicago-based Alfresco partner that delivers both professional services and software solutions to the document management and case management market (press release).

TSG has been in the ECM market for a long time. I remember when Documentum was their bread-and-butter. But they’ve definitely widened their aperture over the years and have expanded beyond traditional consulting and into product development, which is typically hard for a professional services firm to get right. It will be interesting to see how TSG’s team, which includes people who are often simultaneously client-facing consultants and product-focused engineers will be integrated into Alfresco, where professional services and product development are much more segregated.

TSG has a deep bench of talented developers, but beyond the talent acquisition, Alfresco can now add some additional products to the price sheet. OpenContent and OpenAnnotate products will likely be the first that Alfresco will push.

OpenContent provides a user interface on top of content repositories such as Alfresco and others. The demos I have seen were very focused on Case Management, but other use cases can be satisfied.

OpenAnnotate, as the name suggests, allows users to markup documents and videos without leaving their web browser. Alfresco has other partners that provide annotation add-ons, but I’ve never really dug into any of them, including OpenAnnotate.

It wasn’t mentioned in the press release, but OpenMigrate is another offering from TSG where I see interest from clients. It can help with complex migrations from one ECM platform to another. Making it easier for clients to move off of FileNet or Sharepoint to Alfresco is a no-brainer. It might be a bit frustrating when customers use the tool to go the other way, but Alfresco can use that as a selling point: If you don’t like us, here’s a tool to help you leave.

TSG has been doing a lot of promotion lately around its own NoSQL-based and cloud-native document management solution, which can definitely be seen as an alternative to Alfresco’s more traditional repository built on a relational back-end. Alfresco has been busy working to decompose its monolithic stack into a set of more focused, containerized services, but it is still fundamentally the same architecture that has been in place since 2005. Dave Giordano, TSG’s owner and founder, will be taking on the role of Chief Strategy Officer for Alfresco. Might he be able to convince the rest of Alfresco that such a fundamental architectural shift is necessary for Alfresco? We shall see.

I’ll also be curious to see if any of the TSG offerings become freely-available as open source. TSG has always used the “Open” moniker on their product names, and briefly dabbled in making their code available as open source, but sources say they saw only downside, so they made their source code available only to their customers. Maybe the acquisition will mean that TSG’s products will shift to open core. That would certainly open up the TSG product catalog for implementation by other partners and potentially the community beyond that.

Every acquisition will face integration challenges. I hope those are met and overcome quickly and that this is more than a superficial product grab because this could be a chance for a much-needed injection of vision and innovation into Alfresco.