Ricoh And Alfresco Announce Agreement

Ricoh Americas Corporation, the leading provider of digital office equipment, today announced it has aligned with Alfresco Software, Inc., a leading provider of open source enterprise content management solutions, to enhance the content management capabilities of its Multifunction Products (MFPs).
Ricoh has selected Alfresco to satisfy customer demand for leading content management functionality. Ricoh wanted a system with a modern architecture based on open standards with the ability to scale from embedded to enterprise applications. The open source model was also seen as being more cost effective, while still allowing Ricoh to protect any core customizations and intellectual property.

“We see Alfresco as a critical building block that will enhance our solutions,” said Hede Nonaka, senior vice president, Document Solutions and Services Division, Ricoh Americas Corporation. “Flexible open standards-based software like Alfresco will allow us to build better products at lower cost than proprietary systems, offering our customers better value.”

Ricoh is moving towards open source systems and has decided to work with Alfresco as it offers a system with a modern modular architecture, a small footprint less than 40Mb in size and the most scalable, standards-based JSR-170 repository. Alfresco is recognized as the leading open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system provider and offered the first embeddable ECM system in October 2005.

“Alfresco is excited to have been selected by Ricoh and sees this as a major opportunity to create an industry leading content application,” said John Powell, CEO, Alfresco Software Inc. “Alfresco allows our partners to focus on their core engineering and accelerate time to deployment with a robust ECM that is simple to use, simple to rollout and simple to scale-out enterprise-wide.”