Open source ECM company Alfresco has announced an increased drive into the Asia-Pacific marketplace with increased local staff numbers on the back of 13 new customers in the past 12 months.

Alfresco has also appointed three new partners and moved to new premises in North Ryde. The company claims revenue growth is ahead of industry averages with global headcount increasing 20% in the second quarter and more than 2000 enterprise customers in over 40 countries.

Barry Costin, Sales Director for Alfresco APAC, said, “Working with business partners is still our primary route to market and recruiting new partners to provide geographic coverage and address specific vertical requirements in Australia and New Zealand is a big focus.

“We are aiming to bring on board a moderate number of quality partners that can sell, add value to customers and have the skills and domain knowledge to take advantage of the opportunity that Alfresco presents. We are not attempting to saturate the market with partners – fewer but deeper with good profitability all round is definitely the idea,” said Barry.

The Australian Government in January announced positive changes in its technology procurement policies that now require agencies toactively and fairly consider OSS equally alongside proprietary software in all procurements from March 2011. In A/NZ, Alfresco is engaging with the newly launched Open Technology Foundation (OTF), an association dedicated to helping governments make cost effective and innovative use of open technologies.

“This is an encouraging step forward and sends the message that the Federal Government is turning the spotlight on the questionable value they have often received from the large sums of money spent on proprietary solutions when better value, more open and standards-based alternatives exist in the open-source world,” said Barry.

“We agree with the OTF’s statement that international experience shows governments choose open technologies to meet citizens' increasing expectations for service delivery excellence, on platforms whichdeliver economic benefit to the local community, at a significantly reducedcost. We intend to work with the OTF to demonstrate this in the local government sector in the future.”

Alfresco has just released Alfresco Mobile iPad and iPhone applications to allow corporate users direct access to critical business content on the go, and is gearing up for the release of AlfrescoEnterprise 4  in early 2012, which adds new capabilities for managing content distribution to multiple social networking channels.