Alfresco Software acquires SAP connector company Pernexas

Open source software company Alfresco Software has acquired Pernexas, a company that provides connectors for integrating the Alfresco Digital Business Platform with SAP NetWeaver, SAP S/4HANA and SAP Fiori. Alfresco declined to share the details of the deal.

Alfresco claims customers will benefit from the connection between SAP and Alfresco because of the level of control and visibility of unstructured information it will provide. It enables users to take advantage of SAP's capabilities without leaving the applications with which they are familiar.

The Alfresco Digital Business Platform provides an agile framework that customers can use to build processes and content-centric digital capabilities.

According to Tony Grout, chief product officer at Alfresco Software, the company was motivated by increased interest from SAP customers moving to the cloud and looking for a cloud-native platform to support their SAP implementations.

"Having the Pernexas team join Alfresco will see additional resources made available to enhance and support the development of the connector going forward," he said.

Grout added that the move shouldn't affect current users.

"Existing Pernexas customers are already Alfresco customers, so they should see minimal disruption," he said. "Most [Alfresco] customers will see little change. The Pernexas team will continue to develop and support the connector for existing customers."

For new customers, Grout anticipates things will become a little easier.

"They now have a single vendor to support both the Digital Business Platform and the content connector for SAP," he said. "New customers will be able to purchase a complete solution from Alfresco, removing the need to have to negotiate two different contracts."

Pernexas was founded in 2008 and has been a long-standing Alfresco Software partner that markets the SAP-certified connexas product line, comprised of the following:

• Connexas content: SAP-certified for integration with SAP S/4HANA, Connexas content connects Alfresco Content Services with SAP, enables the storage of content in Alfresco accessible from SAP, and makes metadata from SAP business objects available at the Alfresco document, or triggers an SAP action from Alfresco
• Connexas front end: SAP-certified as built on Cloud Platform, Connexas front end enables an Alfresco Process Services user to access workflows via SAP Fiori Launchpad when running within an SAP Cloud Platform
• Connexas process: Enables the use of metadata from SAP within custom workflows of Alfresco Process Services, and has pre-defined SAP function calls