John Newton (co-founder of Documentum) and John Powell (a former COO of
Business Objects) founded Alfresco Software, Inc. in 2005. In July 2005, Alfresco released the first version of their software. Alfresco initially focused on document management, in May 2006, the company announced its intention to expand into web content management by acquiring senior technical and managerial staff from
Interwoven; this included its VP of Web Content Management, two principal engineers, and a member of its user-interface team. In October 2009, the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report described Alfresco as a “leading Java-based open source web content management system”. In 2010, Alfresco sponsored a new
open-source BPM engine called
Activiti. In July 2011, Alfresco and Ephesoft announced a technology collaboration to offer
document capture and
Content Management Interoperability Services brought together for intelligent
PDF capture and search and
workflow development. In January 2013, Alfresco appointed Doug Dennerline, former president of
SuccessFactors, former EVP of Sales at
Salesforce.com, and former CEO of
WebEx, as its new CEO. In September 2014, Alfresco 5 was released with new reporting and analytics features and an overhaul of its document search tool, moving from
Lucene to
Solr. In November 2016, Alfresco launched an AWS Quickstart for building an Alfresco Content Services server cluster on the AWS Cloud. In March 2017, Alfresco rebranded as the Digital Business Platform. This included the release of the Application Development Framework with reusable
Angular JS(2.0) components. On February 8, 2018, it was announced that Alfresco was acquired by the private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P. On September 9, 2020, Alfresco was acquired again by
Hyland Software from Thomas H. Lee Partners for an undisclosed amount. == Products and services ==