TheCUBE staff traveled to San Francisco on March 26, 2014 to attend and broadcast from for the annual AWS Summit, a free, one-day event showcasing the latest AWS services. One of the first guests to step into theCUBE was Luis Sala, Director of Technology Alliances with Alfresco. Today he comments on the market place changes that have occurred during the last year.

“Last year I explained how Alfresco manages documents both on-prem and in the cloud, using hybrid technology. We are collaborating with Amazon on joint-sales and deals, delivering the value of the cloud, and the value of open source document management to our customers. This yielded tremendous results since last year,” answered Sala.

Jeff Frick, General Manager with theCUBE, prods Sala to elaborate on Alfresco’s business growth.

“We started out as a commercial open source technology,” started Sala. “People would download our product, install it on-prem, use it to manage their mission critical /business critical documents and workflows metadata and those types of things.”

He went on in detail: “Over time we’ve discovered that 1) our technology lent itself very nicely to being deployed to AWS and 2), people are catching on to the idea of deploying our product to AWS.”

Here is where Sala sees the beauty of AWS:

• compute
• servers
• storage
• database

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“Our product works really well there; we realized we could easily integrate S3 – which has its own proprietary interface; we started demonstrating this to customers, people started deploying this and it took off like wildfire,” boasted Sala.

He went on to clarify that Alfresco didn’t previously have any sort of SaaS offering, building their SaaS offering using these cloud technologies. “We built it and ran it on top of AWS.”

Serving selective customers

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In terms of growth within the business – debating the on-premise vs SaaS offering – Sala discussed the market uptake, market adoption, specific types of customers and so on.

“The customers who tend to use our products are the ones who care about the security and privacy of the data – they want to be very selective about how this data gets exposed outside of their environment,” detailed Sala. “We need to build a lot of credibility and best practices in order to demonstrate that customers can get to the cloud while still respecting those policies. Our business has grown. Our SaaS customers tend to use us primarily for more lightweight collaboration nowadays, but we are building a whole new Suite of SaaS products that deliver specific business functionality – I’m going to use contracts management as an example here: we are delivering exclusively to the cloud, but it’s going to work on-prem and behind a firewall.”

As for the price-drop announcement, Sala commented: “We have this secure place to store the data that is even more affordable than it was before. I expect this to happen two or three times a year. Amazon is the only technology company that I am aware of that drops prices.”

The intersection of new technology and new age thinking?

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Recounting a story initially told off the record, Sala agreed to elaborate on the issues posed by government bureaucracy.

“There are a lot of paper-based processes out there… a large government organization that handles certain classes of claims and benefits for citizens had a very tedious paper process that would take over a year to process a claim, and deliver the service to the citizen that requested it.”

It got so bad that Comedy Central’s Jon Stuart dedicated an entire series to pointing out problems with paper analog processes, and how the government could benefit from digitization. The unnamed organization wanted to deliver better value, so they made the investment and now deploy Alfresco with scanners to scan documents into Alfresco – they get stored into the AWS’s Gov cloud, “so it’s secure and it’s safe, and we’re going to shorten that lengthy process from one year to three months and, eventually, less than that,” promised Sala.

Is AWS enterprise ready?

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theCUBE host John Furrier cut in by relaying a fresh joke on Crowdchat.net: AWS is “Price-drop as a Service”.  The question that everyone is asking though,  Furrier noted, is “Where are they on the enterprise? What do they need to do differently to be enterprise-ready?”

“We know AWS ever since they were tending to start-ups,” replied Sala. “The problem with start-ups is that they are like the restaurant business: nine in ten are going to fail. In order to build a long term, sustainable business, you need to start looking at traditional enterprises. As an Amazon partner, I have first-hand knowledge and observations on how Amazon’s whole organization is oriented towards building a stronger enterprise business.”

• Keep an eye on the competition

Despite being a behemoth, AWS should keep an eye on the competition, at least according to Sala.

Touching on the topic of OpenStack’s role for the competition, Sala agreed their accomplishments are formidable, but only represent half of the equation: “you don’t get to scale if you don’t have the data centers to deploy this to.”

Wrapping up, Sala commented on the importance of the current event. The most notable issue in his opinion is education. “The best way to get mindshare is by educating your audience,” he stated. This summit is the opportunity to “educate potential users.”

“No one downloads stuff anymore,” noted Furrier debating the trends in the industry. Sala agreed:

“As an open source vendor, our business model was encouraging people to download our product, take an hour to install and configure it, and then test it. When SaaS came around, and really started becoming popular, it essentially replaced that model. Now you have instant gratification: it takes thirty seconds to fill in a registration form and you are using that application. It’s a simple example of the flexibility and power of cloud-delivered applications and solutions. And that is not going to stop. We’re going to see more workloads moving to the cloud, and very few remaining behind the firewall,” forecasted Sala.