Alfresco Software Inc. today is unveiling a cloud-native version of its Digital Business Platform that it will offer as a fully managed service.
The maker of open-source enterprise content management and business process management services pitches its software as a way to create automated workflows involving multiple documents and users. It’s intended for jobs such as document and case management, project collaboration, web content publishing and compliance records management.
The Digital Business Platform, which combines content management, process management, data governance and machine learning in a single package, has been available as a cloud application for some time. But customers had to install, configure and maintain software themselves.
With the release of the managed service, Alfresco is now offering to take on those tasks for them. The cloud-native version also takes advantage of the extreme scalability and reliability of cloud infrastructure.
“Everything you could consume on premises you can now have managed by Alfresco directly: monitoring, upgrades, technical operations, security operations and response,” said Mark Stevens, vice president of strategic platforms at the Boston-based company. “We’ll keep it upgraded, patched and running for you.”
The company is positioning the offering as platform-as-a-service rather than software-as-a-service because “it truly is a development platform where I’m providing infrastructure and you can use our [application program interfaces] to build digital operations on top,” Stevens said.
The software will initially be available on the Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud, although the underlying infrastructure will be basically invisible to customers. This is the first step in what Stevens said will be a steady stream of cloud -related announcements from the company, leading off with a multicloud offering in a few weeks that supports Microsoft Corp.’s Azure.
“This is a crawl, walk, run scenario,” Stevens said. “We’re taking advantage of a lot of new AWS features like their serverless and storage technologies,” including native support for Amazon S3 storage.
Founded in 2005, Alfresco raised more than $68 million in funding before being acquired by private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners last year. The company has more than 1,300 customers. Pricing for the managed service wasn’t specified, although Stevens said cloud subscriptions “will be somewhat higher because some costs are being transferred to us.”
Photo: Unsplash
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