World Economic Forum - Technology Pioneer 2007
Hear Alfresco CTO John Newton talk about what it means to be a Technology Pioneer for 2007
John Newton, CTO and Chairman, has had one of the longest and most influential careers in content management. In 1990, John co-founded, designed and led the development of Documentum®, the leader in content management recently acquired by EMC®.
For the next ten years, he invented many of the concepts widely used in the industry today. In addition, he built Documentum's marketing and professional services organizations in Europe. John has also been an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Benchmark Capital.
John was one of the founding engineers at Ingres® where he helped develop the world's first commercial relational database. John graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.
Alfresco was awarded a Technology Pioneer award in 2007 by The World Economic Forum, who said of Alfresco CTO John Newton:
John Newton, Chairman and CTO of Alfresco, has had a long and influential career in the field of enterprise software and a serial entrepreneur. Most notably, he co-founded Documentum, the leading content management firm bought by EMC in 2003 for $1.6B. In January 2005, he started Alfresco to take advantage of the emerging and disruptive field of open source software.
Here are some of John's thoughts on being presented with the award.
Congratulations on being selected as a technology pioneer for the World Economic Forum. What makes Alfresco so Special that it won the award?
- We are proud to have won the award
- Alfresco is the open source alternative for managing content throughout the enterprise
- Necessary with the exponential increase in information and demand for compliance and regulatory control
- I have been in the industry for over 15 years having co-founded the leader in this industry, Documentum, in 1990
- In 2005, I brought my old team to create a new platform that is 5x faster, easier to install and is as easy to use as a shared file system
What country best facilitates starting a tech company?
- Unfortunately, I have to say it is America even though I am American - that is where the experience is, the capital is, source of product concepts and role models.
- However, I live in the UK and we created Alfresco in the UK not because it is easy, but because it is hard
- Much of what we take for granted in computers and software was created in Britain or by the British in America - compilers, databases, languages, business systems, even the computer itself as part of the Colossus project in World War II
- But all these ideas and intellectual capital were lost to primarily America
- There is a wealth of talent and ideas in Britain - most American software companies have trained sales and marketing executives in the Thames valley and ideas are constantly percolating in Cambridge and Imperial College in London.
- What is missing is matching the ideas to the sales and marketing experience and role models to emulate
- But I think Britain has a bright future and potential in this area as economic policies have changed to encourage retention of this R&D
What Makes an Innovator?
- Three things
- Creativity and ideas
- Necessity - the need and the desire
- Business sense and acumen - understanding how to solve a business problem and to position the idea as the solution to the problem
How does your company directly contribute to imporving the state of the world?
- The world has benefited from Enterprise Content Management in ways that have been more or less invisible up to this point
- Because of ECM, there are many times as many pharmaceuticals coming to market much faster than before saving and improving millions of lives
- Financial services companies are much more transparent reporting the true cost of transactions and where money goes making all business more efficient as a result
- Governments are serving their citizens better than ever before reacting to requests for services and providing greater clarity on where money is going
- Everyone in the Alfresco has been part of this effort
- But this has only happened in the most critical areas of the largest enterprises
- We want to make this available to everyone
- Even small companies can comply with government regulation improving public safety
- Research discoveries can be captured and discovered regardless of how well funded they are
- Poor governments can serve their citizens just as well as rich governments
What do you hope to gain from being a technology pioneer?
- In my previous company, we had a clear, but limited vision of who we could help with content management
- We want to open this to the world
- I would hope to gain greater visibility to how information can help some of the most pressing problems in the world
- What effect could greater transparency have in the developing world and combating corruption?
- To what extent are the problems of global warming and environmental impact an information problem?
- How can sharing and retaining knowledge level the playing field for companies outside the developing world?
- My personal interests have always involved economics and politics, so I think it will just be a hell of a lot of fun to participate.
