Alfresco To Drive Growth After Funding Injection

Alfresco has announced a large injection of venture capital to help the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendor with its global growth drive.

The Maidenhead, UK-based company, which is widely considered to be the world’s second most successful open source company after Red Hat, has received $45m (£27m) in funding. This investment brings Alfresco’s total funding to $65.4m (£39.4m).

Growth Drive

This latest tranche of funding was led by private investment firm Sageview Capital, which joined existing investors Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund and SAP Ventures.

According to Alfresco, the company is looking to “accelerate disruption of the ECM market”, and it will use the investment to drive its global go-to-market strategy. Essentially, it will hire more salespeople, boost its marketing capabilities, and try to turn the content market to a software as a service (SaaS) model.

The focus on growth comes at a time when the company is already performing well. Indeed, Alfresco says it is growing by more than thirty percent annually and at triple the pace of the ECM market overall. Alfresco already claims to have more than 1,800 active customers in 212 countries, and says that it manages more than seven billion documents for over 11 million users worldwide, using a modern architecture built on open standards.

“Alfresco has clearly established itself as the de facto ECM platform for customers who desire smart and modern software that unlocks the power of business-critical content, process and collaboration,” said Ned Gilhuly, founding partner at Sageview Capital. “As demonstrated by its superior growth, product strength, partner ecosystem and leadership team, Alfresco is a great fit for our portfolio.”

“Alfresco is innovating at the intersection of business-critical content, process and collaboration,” said Doug Dennerline, CEO of Alfresco.

“With a customer renewal rate at 90 percent and a strong balance sheet, we took additional funding as jet-fuel to take the company and industry to the next level in critical business services.”

Crowded Market

Alfresco plays in a crowded market, with a number of legacy ECM players on the one side, such as EMC Documentum and Micrsoft SharePoint, coupled with newer, cloud collaboration players on the other.

But the ECM market is also potentially very lucrative. Indeed, Gartner estimated in 2013 that the ECM market is a $5.1bn (£3.1bn) industry.

Alfresco is not a consumer-oriented content management organisation. Rather it specialises in enterprise-grade content management solutions, for highly-regulated industries that are bound by strict compliance rules. Alfresco is the hybrid solution, in that customers can choose to either use it n their premises, or via the cloud. Or they can adopt a hybrid approach, combining both options. And best of all, it is open source.

“It’s also worth sharing that one of the key frustrations of on premise software of the past is the slow pace of innovation,” blogged Dennerline. “With an open architecture, you can actually operate and make changes to your on-premise architecture – when you’re ready – at the pace of the Web.”

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