Alfresco bullish about Indian market

MUMBAI, INDIA: Alfresco, a commercial open source company that provides enterprise content management software solutions, has launched its news software version, Alfresco Enterprise 4, in India.

Alfresco Enterprise 4 comes with the following features like mobility, social content management and cloud capabilities. This is available on-premise as well as on subscription models. The cloud offering is still in the beta testing and is expected to hit the market in the next four months.

“It's been five months since we officially entered the Indian market. Although, we already have enterprise customers in terms of local system integrators (SI), about 200,000 downloads are made in India and that is close to 6-7per cent of our total global downloads,” Vivek Pai, Alfresco's Country Head for India told CIOL in Mumbai.

“We are bullish about India. We are investing huge amounts to develop our presence here by setting up a pre-sales technical team and building partnerships for expansion. As we grow and develop more business in India, we will continue to invest here,” Pai added.

India as a market, he said, the company has around two dozen active enterprise customers using its software on a subscription basis, while equal number of customers are there among the non-active users.

“We are targeting midsize and small enterprise customers, which are highly potential customers of enterprise content management software. By tapping these customers, we would employ partners as well as global Sis that operate in India and other geographies,” Pai said.

Back in 2005, when Alfresco entered the enterprise content management (ECM) industry, it disrupted the industry and for 22 consecutive quarters it delivered double digit growth.

“Alfresco Enterprise 4 is uniquely positioned to capture the market in the mobility, tablet and smart phones,” he said.

“In India, there's a a huge demand for ECM in the enterprise space. Only 30 per cent of enterprises will have a single ECM software, while the rest will have more than 1 to 3 ECM softwares so that there's huge potential for Alfresco,” he said.

According to Pai, the potential customer are in the BFSI, manufacturing and retail sector. The company has signed up with Mahindra Satyam and Cignex Datamatics as its partners.