Alfresco's Channel Revamp And Cloud Partnerships Are Driving Partner Recruitment

A year after launching a major channel program revamp, Alfresco Software has dramatically boosted the ranks of its global partners and is scaling its customer base through technological alliances with cloud heavyweights.

The San Mateo, Calif. vendor of business process and content management solutions has recruited some 40 partners since it introduced the new program in March of last year, including global SI heavyweights like Deloitte, Cognizant, Perficient and many others, Bob Crissman, the company's channel chief, told CRN.

Alfresco's recruitment drive has particularly benefited from integrations of its open source products, which natively combine content management and business process services, with Amazon Web Services and Salesforce, Crissman said.

[Related: 2017 Partner Program Guide]

"As business was growing and moving really rapidly into larger enterprise customers, it became really clear we needed partners to match up with that," Crissman told CRN.

In March of 2016, the program was updated to include more training and new deal registration incentives – a foundation to work with larger integrators and solution providers.

Over the last year, the company struck relationships with cloud giants AWS and Salesforce, building connectors to those platforms.

Amazon was a natural partner, Crissman said, noting Alfresco built its enterprise solutions using microservices architectures that tie into various AWS services.

"If you look at their technology and our technology, they stack up really well together. We're building out our offering so it takes advantage of AWS," Crissman said.

While the open source software can be deployed in various environments, "if you decide on AWS, you're going to realize value faster, you're going to get to market faster, you can take advantage of their services, such as analytics."

A Salesforce connector was another natural extension of the product, and that relationship is starting to ramp up, Crissman said, given how much content gets developed in the CRM-leader's platform.

While Alfresco's software is available on the AWS and Salesforce marketplaces, "the better story" is the opportunity for partners to implement the joint solutions and add value around those offerings, he said. To that end, Alfresco has teamed with the sales teams of both enterprise cloud giants, helping its partners sell services in tandem with those vendors.

"We've stepped it up from a go-to-market standpoint," Crissman said. "We're making introductions of smaller boutique partners to AWS."

Among the new partners, signed about six months ago, is Vega ECM, an enterprise workflow specialist headquartered in Orange, Calif., but with a global workforce.

David Proestos, the company's senior vice president, said Vega ECM was looking to diversify beyond its relationship with IBM and add a second business workflow platform. After a long evaluation process, and consideration of a dozen vendors, Alfreso was an obvious choice, he said.

Vega specializes in large deployments of enterprise applications, mostly focused on business process management for banks, insurance companies, and governments.

"Looking at the market, we figured we didn't want to be tied to only one vendor. We wanted something that was open source, that was powerful, that gave us options," Proestos said.

Alfresco's platform was one of the only solutions capable of scaling to the demands of Vega's typical customers. The solution provider was also impressed with Alfresco's open source and modern technology, and the company's clear growth path, Proestos told CRN.

As Vega is pursuing enterprise application modernization engagements, especially attacking EMC accounts running outdated technology, "our skillset and migration combined with the technology Alfresco offers is really a unique value proposition," he told CRN.