Alfresco provides further proof that open source is mainstream

Alfresco has been on a roll lately. Word on the street is that Alfresco just nailed another quarter (That's eight straight quarters of growth and hitting its plan). This week Alfresco came out with some other cool news that I was forced pry out of of Matt Asay, as we both try to not shill for our own companies.

First, Alfresco and Adobe announced an extension of their previously announced partnership around Adobe Livecycle, with Alfresco now at the heart of Adobe's Acrobat.com document service. Acrobat.com combines the ability to create PDFs, share documents, host files, integrate web conferencing, and work with Adobe's web-based word processing system, Buzzword. It's a pretty cool service, and great that Alfresco is the core repository for it all.

Second, Alfresco got tipped by The 451 Group as the primary (I would say the only) competitor to Microsoft's ubiquitous SharePoint product:

Alfresco is ahead of the ECM pack with its SharePoint integration, says Kathleen Reidy, senior analyst at research firm The 451 Group. The most compelling short-term news is that they have that Office-level integration, Reidy says. That makes it a lot more viable for IT management to say, 'We're going to pull out the SharePoint Server or complement the SharePoint Server with Alfresco.'

Making the Alfresco solution unique versus other open source ECM offerings is that competing solutions require a plug-in, according to Reidy. I'm not aware of anyone else that has done that protocol-level integration at this point, she says.

It's good news for Adobe, better news for Alfresco, and great news for open source. Open source has gone mainstream. It's the core of an increasing array of services, from Acrobat.com to Google.com. And I have no doubt there are thousands of other services that run on open source that have yet to go public with their technology choice.