The fact that people inside corporations are leveraging social networks outside their corporation isn't news to anybody. But what is news is the fact that corporations are starting to integrate their enterprise applications with applications created for social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
At the forefront of this trend is a provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software called Alfresco that uses an open source model to bring its software to market. According to company CTO John Newton they've already had a number of customers ask them to integrate Facebook and LinkedIn applications with the Alfresco ECM system so the customers can work better with all the contractors that make up their extended enterprise.
The next step, says Newton, is for Alfresco to add support for the Open Social Protocol so customers can integrate any social network application that supports that protocol with the Alfresco system. Inside the Alfresco system Newton has also moved to mimic a social network environment by leveraging the audit trail function built into the software to create a publish and subscribe information system that lets people see what other topics people in the company are interested in, what they are reading and updating, and even tagging.
Alfresco may not be a household name in the enterprise yet but Newton was one of the co-founders of Documentum, which is now a unit of EMC. Today Alfresco has over 500 customers paying it to support its open source implementation of ECM, which has already been downloaded over one million times.
Alfresco customers include Electronic Arts, Harvard Business School, the European Union, the National Rail Service in the United Kingdom, the French Ministry of Justice and the U.S. National Archive. The basic idea behind Alfresco to leverage the same open source model that has been successful in the other software categories in a $4 billion ECM market that includes Documentum, OpenPages, OpenText, IBM's FileNet unit, Micosoft, Vignette and Interwoven.
As open source continues to mature Newton says it is unlikely that the vast majority of customers are going to see the need to pay to license ECM software when most of them only need the core functions that can be found in the Alfresco system. That may be true but the adoption of ECM has also been limited because it typically imposed a top-down workflow system on the people who used it. But with the ability to front end an ECM system with any number of social network applications built by the people that use them the value proposition of an ECM system could be a whole lot greater by integrating corporate records and images with a set of applications that people actually want to use.