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Informa, a Leading International Provider of Specialist Information Chooses Alfresco; Open Source Dramatically Reduces the Cost of Enterprise Content Management

Posted on: Monday, 31 October 2005, 09:00 CST

Alfresco Software, Inc., the first provider of an open source enterprise content management solution, today announced that Informa, the leading international provider of specialist information and services for the academic, professional and business communities has chosen Alfresco for Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Informa saw Alfresco as the path to dramatically reducing the cost of ECM and provide a way to avoid being tied into proprietary standards. The industry is coming to the conclusion that open source is the way forward and over $400 million has been invested in open source companies in the last 18 months.

"Informa is comprised of many companies of various sizes that cut across multiple business sectors representing widely differing business practices with correspondingly varied requirements for ECM applications," said Bob Hecht, VP - Content Strategy for Informa. "We were looking for a flexible, cost-effective solution that could address this diverse set of requirements and allow us to leverage our existing internal development team. We have determined Alfresco's technical approach to be an excellent fit for our immediate and long-range business objectives while their business model provides real value by significantly reducing the platform's TCO. When we combined this with the risk-mitigating factor provided by the cumulative practical knowledge experience of the Alfresco team in the fields of ECM and user interface development, we can say with confidence that this is the right solution at the right time."

The success of the current project hinges on ease-of-use. Informa users will be able to work in their native editing tools and view Alfresco as a simple shared drive. Alfresco's Aspect-Oriented approach has allowed document lifecycle rules to be configured quickly and easily. Here, author, review, approve and distribute workflows are being configured with rules to transform documents to the required formats. Informa wants to leapfrog the proprietary state of the ECM industry and choose an open approach to content management. Standards such as JSR-168 for portal integration, JSR-170 for content management and Web Services for integration were seen as highly important.

"We have a great deal of experience in document lifecycle management both in regulated and unregulated environments," said John Newton, chief technology officer, Alfresco. "One of our goals was to make managing the publishing lifecycle as simple to use as Word(TM) and a shared drive. The choice by Informa reflects the progress we have made towards this goal for the publishing industry."

About Informa plc

Informa plc is a leading international provider of specialist information and services for the academic, professional and business communities. The company has over 150 offices in over 40 different countries and employs almost 7,000 staff with major centers in the UK and the USA. It has annual sales of more than $1.4bn and their customers are located all over the world.

About Alfresco

Alfresco Software, Inc. is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. It is the first company to bring the power of open source to the enterprise content management market, enabling unprecedented scale and a much lower total cost of ownership than proprietary systems. Founded by a team of content management veterans that includes the co-founder of Documentum, John Newton and former COO of Business Objects, John Powell. Alfresco is based in London. For more information, visit www.alfresco.org.

Source: Business Wire

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