There are three products: Alero Enterprise, Alero Express, and Xtorm. Each of these products is a development framework that combines multiple technologies into one integrated product with one consistent architecture, helping businesses build solutions and manage their enterprise information easier, faster, and cheaper. The result: true Enterprise Information Management solutions that bridge the gap between disparate data, applications, locations, and people.

About Xtorm: Alero Technology stopped the development of Xtorm in 2005 and is only maintaining this product for customers that have not moved into Alero yet. This product is still highly used in South Korea and Japan.

About Alero Enterprise: Alero Enterprise is the next version of Xtorm and the next generation. It has been greatly improved in all areas of the product, including the design, architecture, and features. Today, Alero and Xtorm are two completely different products but 100% compatible. Customers using Xtorm can migrate to Alero without tedious conversions, migrations, and/or compilations. Applications written for Xtorm should work fine with Alero.

About Alero Express: Alero Express is a limited version of Alero Enterprise (up to 50 users).

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The idea behind Alero is to provide a platform for the management of information that:

• is completely agnostic to the information managed--structured, semi-structured, and unstructured;

• provides a rich set of functionality to facilitate the management of information, including ECM, BPM, integration, audit/trail, notification, virtualization, etc.;

• virtualizes the access, management, integration and security of information, hiding the complexity of the system, including the number of servers, platforms, vendors, data types, etc. managed by the system;

• can meet the performance, volume, transaction, scalability and distribution requirements of any organization today and in the future; and

• can dramatically reduce the time, costs, and risks associated with developing, deploying, maintaining and supporting integrated composite solutions;

• allows partners to compete with one solution regardless of their business' solution size (small, medium, large, and/or very large).

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Alero is a comprehensive development framework that combines Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Content Integration (ECI), and Enterprise Information Integration (EII) technologies into a single product, under a uniform service-oriented architecture. By combining these technologies in a single product, Alero can help orchestrate the disparate systems of an enterprise to act as one single uniform system. The result is a true Enterprise Information Management�EIM�environment that virtualizes the enterprise, allowing secure access to information that may come from one or multiple systems or from any place at any time.

Alero is a next generation software product that takes enterprise information management (EIM) to a new level. Unlike other products in the market that are designed for specific functions (e.g., document management, process management, billing, reporting, etc.), that can only manage a single type of data (e.g., content, records in a database, XML, etc.), and that rely on older technologies or designs that still lock up information, creating �Silos of information� or �Stovepipe solutions�, Alero was designed to be completely agnostic to the type of information being managed, facilitating the access, management, integration, security, and, more importantly, virtualization of potentially any type of information. Although Alero was designed as an open integration and compliance platform, it is commonly used in solutions that simply require content management, business process management, integration, or a combination.

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Alero is the result of combining the current and future information management needs of large corporations with the combined experience of the Alero partners collected over the years from developing and working with high transaction, high volume solutions and customers.

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Alero is similar to other products in functionality but extremely different in concept and architecture. It is similar in the fact that it provides common functions for content management, business process management, integration, compliance, etc., competing with other products that provide the same functionality. As such, if you are looking for one or more of these technologies, Alero is very similar to many other products in the same markets.

However, Alero differs from most products in the market due to the fact that:

• It was designed from the ground up to be an integration platform (Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)), making the product completely agnostic to the type of information being managed. All the functionality for ECM, BPM, integration, notification, virtualization, compliance, etc. is built on top of this ESB as a service (SOA). Most other products were specifically design for some type of purpose like document imaging, document management, etc., providing stove-piped solutions that exacerbate the current information integration experienced by IT and organizations in general.

• Most products in the market have grown by acquisition, struggling to integrate completely different technologies into a single product suite. Alero, on the other hand, is a single product with a single, consistent architecture (SOA). All functions provided by Alero, including ECM, BPM, Integration, virtualization, compliance, notification, federation, and many more, are built on top of this integration platform as a service (SOA).

• It uses the latest designs, architectures, and tools to provide an innovative, lean-and-mean, and easy-to-use solution that is modular, flexible, open, fast, reliable, and cost efficient.

• It is a true Enterprise wide solution. It has not known boundaries in terms of users, transactions, volumes, documents, etc. It can be used for simple (group, departmental) to very large, complex initiatives (corporate wide) regardless of the complexity, including the number of servers, locations, transaction volumes, number of users, etc.

• It drastically reduces the time-to-production or the time-to-market by drastically reducing the time, cost and risk associated with the development, deployment, maintenance

• It provides unmatched performance, reliability, manageability at an unbeatable price.

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Alero can be used as follows:

• As the foundation for new solutions, 

• To add value to existing solutions, or

• As a complete, off-the-shelf solution.

As a foundation, Alero can be used as the foundation of new applications or solutions, taking advantage of the flexibility, scalability, performance, reliability, continuity, and extensive features provided by the product. By providing 60% to 90% of what is required in almost any new solution, Alero dramatically reduces the development, time-to-market/production, costs and risks associated with these initiatives.

As a value-added, Alero can be easily integrated with existing applications or solutions, adding value to them easily and quickly without having to develop, maintain, and support technologies that may be out of your core expertise or that you just do not want to develop (reinvent the wheel).

As a complete solution, Alero can be used as a complete solution for partners that provide services but do not want to own or develop their own technologies. As such, Alero provides them with a suite of solutions in all the areas covered by the product, including ECM, storage, BPM, integration, virtualization, etc.

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Alero is a horizontal product designed for the management of enterprise information. As such, it can be used for any type of solution regardless of the market segment or target market you play in. Although it is currently heavily used for content management and business process management in the financial, telecommunications and government segments, it is not because of limitations of the product but because of partners' preferences.

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The scope of the product is well defined throughout the Alero website and marketing materials. Alero is an enterprise information management (EIM) framework that facilitates the development, deployment, maintenance, and support of complete integrated composite solutions, reducing the time, costs, and risks associated with these initiatives.

Alero Technology took a proactive approach during the initial development phase of the product by developing all the products/modules needed in foreseeable future at the time as part of the product. Now, after 10 years in the market, Alero has taken a more reactive approach where new products/modules are incrementally added as the needs change, depending on market trends and customer needs.

Currently, the scope of the product comprehends the following services:

• Repository Services, which implement the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) capabilities of the product, including: capture (scanning), content management (imaging), document management (library services), content storage management, records management, electronic signature management, high speed import, and WebDAV support.

• Process Services, which implement the Business Process Management (BPM) capabilities of the product, including the BPM engine and web based applications to design, simulate, monitor, trace and view processes.

• Content Services, which implement services that are common to all the modules, including federated searches and notification.

• Integration Services, which implement the Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) and Enterprise Information Integration (EII) capabilities of the product, including integration with other content management product and application/solutions using adapter technology.

• Security Services, which implement the Security Management capabilities of the product, including a proprietary security module and an LDAP-compliant one.

• Event Services, which implement the Event Management capabilities of the product, including audit and trail.

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