Open sauce Alfresco has its best ever quarter

ALFRESCO SOFTWARE announced its strongest ever quarterly financial results today, reporting that customer interest has increased during the global economic downturn as organisations turn to more cost effective and scalable open source software products.

The open sauce company said that UK businesses and government agencies evidently have been rethinking proprietary software strategies and are seeking more value for money as they review software licences and start up new projects.

It said trends have reversed from late 2007 in that UK customers have become less hesitant to consider open source software. Alfresco claimed that the UK is now the second strongest growth market for open source adoption after the US.

Alfresco named as new customers for its open source enterprise management and web content management software offerings Arcadia Petroleum, Betfair, Bristol City Council, Hertsmere Council, Imprima, National Rail, The Open Group and Screen Digest.

It said open source delivers support of standards with substantial reductions in licencing fees while allowing customers to control costs with enterprise-class support subscriptions without proprietary vendor lock-in.

Alfresco said it recently launched the third generation of its Open Source Labs product line, including:

* Alfresco Share, a next generation social computing collaboration application

* Draft CMIS implementation, a content management standard that allows applications to work with the leading Enterprise Content Management systems

* Support for the Microsoft Office SharePoint protocol, providing users with the first open source fully-compatible SharePoint repository

* Alfresco Surf, a platform to enable development of dynamic, REST-oriented web applications and collaborative web sites.

"The world is undergoing serious economic turbulence, but at a time when businesses know they cannot simply terminate IT projects, open source software provides the perfect solution," said Alfresco Software CEO John Powell.

"By resisting the demands of monopolist proprietary vendors, organisations in both the UK's public and private sectors are reaping the benefits of creating flexible and scalable infrastructures whilst lowering their overall IT spend.

"Alfresco has just recorded its most successful ever quarter and we're looking forward to continuing that success through 2009." µ