Bringing commercial content management software development experience to the open source arena.

Information Week has an article titled Open-Source Exuberance, In this article they discuss the new venture of Software entrepreneur John Newton in the open source content management space.

Newton was a co-founder of Documentum Inc. which he and his top brass sold to EMC Corp. in 2003 for $1.7 billion, now its estimated to be worth $2.5 billion.

Now Newton along with former Business Objects S.A. chief operating officer John Powell launched Alfresco Software Inc., a content-management software provider whose core technology was assembled out in the open-source community by dozens of independent-minded programmers. By leveraging the power of the people, Alfresco is looking to upend the balance of power in a market for content-management systems dominated by EMC, Interwoven, Vignette, and other major players.

Alfresco's success hinges on the savvy of its management team and their ability to sell services around software that anyone can download for free. To do this, the company has to start at the bottom by wooing smaller businesses that would rather create their own file-sharing systems or simply do without formal content management than invest princely sums on such software

Newton pitches Alfresco as breaking new ground by offering a product that's easy to use but also features the security, version control, metadata and full-text search, and workflow features found in more-expensive packages. "With our system, all you have to do is drag and drop the content," says Newton, who serves as the company's chairman and chief technology officer.

Alfresco's ambition isn't to be a niche application. Newton has a sky's-the-limit view similar to that of JBoss Inc. and MySQL AB, meaning the company is selling products and services to users with the hope that developers in the open-source community will supplement Alfresco's efforts and eventually help create products that rival the market leaders. Proprietary vendors don't interact with their customers the way the open-source community keeps tabs on the needs of its users. "It becomes more of a dialogue between the person who developed the system and the person using the system," Newton says.

Prashanth RaiTag(s): Open Source, CMS.