Alfresco Taps Doug Dennerline for CEO

In a move to accelerate its shift to the cloud, enterprise content management supplier Alfresco named Silicon Valley veteran Doug Dennerline as its new CEO, replacing co-founder John Powell.

Dennerline spent much of his career at Cisco, where he ran its WebEx division. Among his other cloud credentials, Dennerline worked for Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff as executive VP of sales and most recently as president of SuccessFactors, a software as a service talent management provider that SAP acquired last year for $3.4 million.

Alfresco, a London-based software provider that counts the United States for half its sales, will extend its presence in San Francisco looking to tap the region's IT sales, marketing and development expertise. The company made a major move toward enabling its ECM platform to run in the cloud as a service and target mobile devices a year ago with the release Alfresco Enterprise 4.

In an interview on Monday, Dennerline said he found Alfresco's desire to accelerate the company's cloud push, support for mobile devices along with its steady growth and its open source model appealing.

"I've been living in the cloud for seven years and watching what CIOs are doing and being asked to do in terms of making use of the public cloud, which seems to be pretty well accepted around the world now," Dennerline said. "CEOs are going to CIOs and saying, 'You need to lower the cost of your infrastructure and the applications you're supporting to the end users, and candidly you need to give them a better experience than they now have so they can be more productive.'"

The company said it just completed its 24th consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth with numerous deals valued at $1 million and higher. Dennerline sounded like he has ambitious plans for Alfresco, which he admitted he hopes will include an initial public offering.

"That would be on an ideal outcome here," he said. "We are on trajectory in terms of growth and number of customers and are growing at a steady pace. If we can accelerate that, that would be something we would want to do because we will need the public market financing to help us grow even faster than we already are."

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/15/2013 at 12:48 PM