Alfresco takes it to the cloud

Alfresco is taking its show to the cloud and this week announced the first of what promises to be a series of initiatives related to Alfresco content management and cloud computing. For starters, Alfresco has made its first official server image available to users on Amazon's EC2. You can learn more here in this video.

In addition, Alfresco announced this week that it was launching a new Alfresco Cloud Developer program called Cloud Content Application Developer Program. According to the press release, "Alfresco will provide an open source Amazon EC2-ready stack and developer kit for customers and partners to develop, deploy and monetize cloud service architecture (CSA) content applications on the EC2 platform."

Alfresco CEO John Powell believes that systems need to scale to user need and cloud computing can help achieve that in a more cost-effective manner. "Content growth requires a sophisticated ECM solution that can scale users and content volumes simply and at low cost without massive up-front capital expenditure," Powell says.

He points out that Alfresco is running cloud projects today "with millions of users, terabytes of data and hundreds of millions of documents.” He adds, “Legacy applications may run in the cloud, but modern content service approaches consuming services resident in the same cloud are required to inherit the full benefits of a cloud service architecture. Only then can enterprises and governments achieve the cost efficiencies of on-demand scalability, fault tolerance and cloud-wide network security for documents, records and collaboration.”

Clearly, there is a future for organizations in the cloud looking for more cost-effective ways to provide services like content management to organizations without having to spend huge amounts of money building and maintaining the infrastructure to support those services.

For more information:
- see the Alfresco press release

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