What we’re dying to hear at Alfresco Summit

For the first time, ever, I will not be in attendance at this year’s annual Alfresco conference. I’m going to miss catching up with old friends, meeting new ones, learning, and sharing stories.

I’m also going to miss hearing what Alfresco has planned. Now, more than ever, Alfresco needs to inspire. As I won’t be there I need the rest of you to go to Alfresco Summit and take good notes for me. Here’s what you should be listening for…

What Are You Doing With the Money, Doug?

At last year’s conference Alfresco CEO, Doug Dennerline, made a quip about how much fun he was having spending all of the money Alfresco had amassed prior to his arrival. Now he’s secured another round of funding.

I think partners, customers, and the community want to hear what the specific plans are for all of that cash. In a Q&A with the community, Doug said he felt like there were too few sales people for a company the size of Alfresco’s. In the old days, Alfresco had an “inbound” model, where people would try the free stuff and call a sales person when they were ready for support. Doug is inverting that and going with a traditional “outbound” model. That obviously takes cash, and it may be critical for the company to grow to where Doug and the investors would like, but it is rather uninspiring to the rest of us. Where are the bold, audacious plans? Where is the disruption? Which brings me to my next theme to listen for…

Keep Alfresco Weird

Remember when Alfresco was different? It was open source. It was lightweight. It appealed to developers and consultants because it could approximate what a Documentum aircraft carrier could do but it had the agility of a speedboat. And, perhaps above all, it was cheap.

Now it feels like that free-wheeling soul, that maverick of ECM, that long-haired hippy love-child, born of a one-night stand between ECM and Linux, is looking in the mirror and realizing it has slowly become its father.

Maybe in some ways, growing up was necessary. Alfresco certainly feels more stable than years past. But what I want to hear is that the scrappiness is still there. I want to see some features that competitors haven’t thought of yet. I want to look into the eyes of the grown-up Alfresco and see (and believe) that the mischievous flicker of youth is still glowing, ready to shake things up.

Successfully Shoot the Gap Or Get Crushed?

Alfresco is in a unique position. There are the cloud-only players on one side who are beating Alfresco on some dimensions (ease-of-use, flawless file sync, ubiquity) and are, at least for now, losing to Alfresco on other dimensions (on-premises capability, security, business relevance). On the other side, you’ve got legacy players. Alfresco is still more nimble than they are, but with recent price increases, Alfresco can no longer beat them on price alone. That gap is either Alfresco’s opportunity or its demise.

Every day those cloud-only players add business-relevant functionality that their (huge) user base demands. They’ve got endless cash. And dear Lord, the marketing. If I have to read one more bullshit TechCrunch article about how Aaron Levie “invented” the alternative to ECM, I’m going to lose it. Bottom-line is that the cloud-only guys have their sites set on Alfresco’s bread-and-butter.

And those legacy vendors, the ones Alfresco initially disrupted with an open source model, are not only showing signs of life, but in some cases are actually introducing innovative functionality. If Alfresco turns away from the low-cost leader strategy they miss out on a huge lever needed to unseat incumbent vendors. “Openness” may not be enough to win in a toe-to-toe battle of function points.

So what exactly is the strategy for successfully shooting the gap? We’ve all heard the plans Alfresco has around providing content-centric business apps as SaaS offerings. That sounds great for the niche markets interested in those offerings. But that sounds more like one leg of the strategy, not the whole thing. I don’t think you’re fighting off Google, Microsoft, and Amazon with a few new SaaS offerings a year.

So Take Good Notes For Me

Alfresco has had two years to establish the office in the valley, to get their shit together, and to start kicking ass again. What I’m hoping is that at this year’s Alfresco Summit, they will give us credible details about how that $45 million is going to be spent in such a way as to make all of the customers, partners, employees, and community members glad they bet their businesses and careers on what was once an innovative, game-changing, start-up called Alfresco.

Take good notes and report back!

24 comments

  2. Marco Serpilli says:

    Hello Jeff, I do not know if you remember me. Three years ago we started the development of a DAM solution focused on digital asset management for the fashion market. The project is a great success so much so that we have founded a new company called WARDA (www.warda.it).
    We’ve had a lot of problems with the sales force Alfresco: after convincing the customer to switch from community version to the enterprise, sales force Alfresco treated us very badly. Absurd requests, unacceptable impositions. Contrary to what was decided at the beginning we thought of changing technology because with them we can not establish any positive relationship. In addition to everything, from the technological point of view, as you say, there is no vision and the world of digital asset management is evolving very quickly. Sin, an opportunity lost due a low-level management.

  3. Jeff Potts says:

    Andreas,

    I think that’s an interesting question. I suspect that open source did what they hoped it would do–it put Alfresco into the hands of many people. What I think may have been a miscalculation was how many people would end up downloading it and what percentage of those people would ultimately become enterprise subscribers. The model got the company to around $30 million in annual revenue, which is impressive. But I think the original founders and investors (and certainly the current board and management team) are hoping for much more. Unfortunately, to get there it looks like the commercial open source model requires much higher adoption and better conversion rates than Alfresco has been able to hit thus far. (Even commercial open source players “lower” in the stack, and therefore much more widely adopted are having trouble hitting large revenue numbers). The conversion of the company from an inbound model to more of an outbound model, and the introduction of the SaaS offerings tells us that a shift to a more traditional model is underway. This doesn’t mean that Community Edition is going away, but I think it may be less important as a lead driver over time.

    I suspect this need for a higher conversion rate (from the free offering to the paid offering) will also drive more and more differentiation between the free and paid products. I think the community will end up filling many of those gaps by implementing their own add-ons to compete with the enterprise-only features, and that may drive a bigger wedge between the commercial interests of the company and the community, but we shall see.

    Jeff

  4. Andreas Steffan says:

    There is no doubt that Alfresco is overall successful in economical terms and numbers shown here. That’s what really matters at the end of the day. Some of those numbers need further explanation though. 200k systems is a lot. I wonder what exactly has been counted and how this breaks down in EE/CE, Production/Development and so forth. But that success does not imply that Open Source is working as it expected. In fact, the shift towards the outbound model/paid features seems to confirm it is not the case. For me it feels a bit like Oracle with MySQL or Open Office which I don’t consider attractive for developers. And being not attractive for developers hurts the ecosystem of a platform.

    On the contrary, have a look at another platform – Docker. The market is completely different, but I think there is absolutely no doubt they are at least getting Open Source right.

  5. Nicolai Sally says:

    Hi Jeff, Apparently I shall miss you in London, had hoped for a powow with you. Actually we converted to Enterprise since Barcelona last, sign of our confidence in the product. Notwithstanding I agree to your questions and we’re certainly equally interested in getting the details of the Alf roadmap, Devops, features and what not, so that we may conjugate with our own needs. My deck is all about that journey to enterprise really … I encourage to LinkedIn me – you’re In privat …. We’ll be taking notes. Cheers.

  6. Ken Geis says:

    My experience from the Summit was that the leadership is not interested in keeping Alfresco weird. They definitely think that Alfresco has gotten enough attention that it can compete on the same playing field as legacy ECM. The justification for the pricing on their upcoming vertical applications: “The market has gone per-user.”

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