Matt Asay • Alfresco

Matt Asay is VP of Business Development at Alfresco the open source enterprise content management platform company.Matt is also chair of the Open Source Business Conference which Matt founded in 2003 and where we recorded this conversation earlier this week. Matt also writes the open source blog on cnet.In the first part of this conversation Matt defines Alfresco as a content services platform with deep content repository capabilities. This Alfresco core competency is a vital asset to companies wrangling large amounts of documents (ie most companies!), I asked Matt about the Microsoft Sharepoint solution to the document management issue.The open source world is competing very effectively with the 'old school players' in the document management space but Sharepoint is a formidable competitor.Balmer defines Sharepoint as the foundation of the next generation Microsoft propietary operating system and therefore repository; a 'one way street into Microsoft...from an open collaboration perspective it's frightening'.The european union legal constraints on Microsoft help to perpetuate the hooks into Sharepoint that allow interoperability, and Microsoft are in most cases currently amenable to working with companies like Alfresco.Meanwhile, Cisco's open source collaborative strategy is an intriguing counterpoint to Microsoft's approach.