Business development: more about Alfresco
I wrote a post about Alfresco two days ago, and today I read a Matt Asay‘s post with some data from Alfresco, and I wouldn’t have been able to pose better questions!
Lead Generation. Alfresco’s website (Downloads/product trials) drives 72% of our leads, and documentation drives another 21%.
[..]PR, which leads to visits to our website and subsequent downloads, is the biggest driver for our business. Lesson? Invest in great PR and ensure your web presence is well-designed to receive the visitors.
So it’s true, Enterprise Content Management System is a promising application area for commercial open source. And yes, PR is vital. After all, didn’t Alfresco hire Matt on purpose?
“Free” is good business. We only recently started measuring unpaid implementations of Alfresco, and have over 6,000 “Community” implementations.
May be Alfresco has a 1/1000 ratio of customers/users, just like Mysql? I bet the ratio would be better in the very next future.
Btw, because our business is essentially support (as this is the primary ongoing value we provide to a customer, just like any software company), we’ve found it imperative to have support inextricably connected with engineering.
Well, support is essential, we know, but when it’s your core business it’s the most important critical success factor. Thanks Matt for such information!
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