Alfresco Enterprise 4 Adds Free Public Cloud Support

Open source content management supplier Alfresco has announced a new version, Alfresco Enterprise 4, which allows users to expand to multi-tenant public clouds.

Some parts of the cloud vision are still in beta, but the new version of Alfresco’s commercial software (which follows last year’s launch of the community version of Alfresco 4) is the most significant development yet for the company which aims to displace old-fashioned enterprise content management with an open source model.

Proprietary “can’t compete”

“OpenText, Documentum, Autonomy, they have all been swallowed up, mainly because they can’t compete with the open source model,” Alfresco CEO John Powell told (pictured) TechWeekEurope at the London launch. “We are now the largest privately owned open source company in the world.”

“ECM systems were never designed for people, they were designed for companies to cover their arses,” said Powell, who started Alfresco after working at Business Objects.

The new version follows earlier releases which were well received, and  includes an HTML5-enabled interface for social content collaboration as well as improved mobile access to ride the wave of smartphones and tablets in the enterprise.

It is also integrated with business productivity tools like GoogleDocs, Microsoft Office and Quickoffice

Powell has previously siad that open source will thrive in a recession, and other open source players welcomed the new Alfresco.

“Alfresco Enterprise 4 is another demonstration that the open source model delivers compelling innovation and value to customers,” said Lee Congdon, CIO at Red Hat . “More importantly, open source and open standards are becoming the key to bridging public and private clouds to give enterprises choice in how they deploy enterprise applications. Alfresco’s cloud connected content approach delivers on all of those fronts.”