Save up to 96pc on ECM with Open Source stack

LONDON, UK: Alfresco Software Inc., a leader in open source enterprise content management (ECM), has released a comparative analysis of ECM pricing.

The Alfresco Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) whitepaper, based on publicly available pricing from a range of vendors, shows how it is possible to save, in the first year of implementation (based on a 1000 user configuration) up to 89 percent of the cost of SharePoint purchases and up to 96 percent of the cost of other ECM solutions by using Alfresco’s open source ECM. The whitepaper aims to demystify some of the complexity around current proprietary ECM pricing and demonstrate how choosing and implementing an open source ECM solution can be a transparent and cost-effective process.

With IT budgets being squeezed, businesses are under pressure to deliver more with less resource. Alfresco’s whitepaper shows how organizations can focus on lowering cost, increasing simplicity and ensuring greater choice by examining the real costs of implementing EMC/Documentum, OpenText, Microsoft SharePoint and Alfresco.

Alongside its open source partners such as Sun Microsystems and Red Hat, Alfresco champions a new way of budgeting for IT. In the past, projects have scaled on high-end, high-cost hardware and large software roll outs resulting in ECM purchases dictating the make-up of the rest of an organization’s IT infrastructure. Today, open source software frees businesses from the shackles of proprietary lock-in, on both hardware and software, allowing them to define how the rest of the stack will look and integrate. Budgets previously devoured by high license fees are now freed up to reduce costs or make projects that were previously not financially viable possible.

“In the current economic climate CIO’s and IT executives are looking to lower cost, with a minimal upfront investment that can be driven out of operating expense as opposed to capital expense, as well a simplicity for rapid deployment and immediate business value,” said Dr. Ian Howells, CMO at Alfresco Software. “Open source is at the core of lowering cost, and TCO by reusing existing hardware, software and skills with no lock-in.”

"Corporations are intent on commoditizing their IT infrastructure and lowering their cost of operations. Sun’s MySQL database reduces the Total Cost of Ownership of database software by over 90 percent. After harvesting huge efficiencies from using open source software, companies are now targeting usage through the stack getting similar TCO reductions," said Jeff Wiss, Database Group, Sun Microsystems. “At no other time in recent history has the need for enterprises’ to effectively manage their IT investment been so apparent. Open source technology stacks offer CIOs’ choice and interoperability and CFO’s dramatically lower costs.”