Luis Sala, Director of Technology Alliances at Alfresco, discussed their technology partnership with Amazon’s AWS with theCube host Jeff Frick, SiliconANGLE, live from the AWS 2013 Summit.

Describing Alfresco as an open source content management system, Luis Sala explained that their customers can download and run their CMS within minutes, but that the Cloud component helps them “get instant gratification” as they can set up, share and use documents in no time at all.

Asked how Alfresco got into the cloud and partnered with AWS, Sala said “it was a combination of luck and being aware of what the trends were.”  The Alfresco product has been developed based on open source code and open standards, making it easily deployed to AWS and allowing the company to take advantage of services provided by Amazon like no other enterprise technology provider.

Exemplifying their adaptability, Sala said he has written the code for a connector to support S3 for file storage that is part of AWS within two days, making it available to customers extremely fast.

Jeff Frick asked his interviewee to explore the customer’s perspective when it comes to the options and factors when choosing a deployment option. Sala identified cost, time to market and the desire for customization as the most important factors. “The cost and timeliness are the biggest factors,”Sala says.  “The rest are hihgly dependent on each use case.”

Talking about the choice between adopting cloud or not, Sala said the cloud option of Alfresco addresses customers “who want secure document sharing,” and they want to do it with full control and full awareness of where their files are. Through its partnership with Amazon, that is what Alfresco is offering – secure document drop box.

A use case of this offering presented by Sala was a pharmaceutical company. The end result was a combination of an out-of-the-box product: 90 percent of the setup, plus some additional customized services focusing mainly on security.

Commenting on the concept of ecosystem when it comes to AWS, Sala said this congregation of partners is really “what drives innovation and traction in the marketplace.”

“Amazon is where we get together,” and then consulting partners and technology partners complete the ecosystem – which creates a venue to market and provide solutions, but also expand them and provide support to customers.