Friday, October 17, 2014

Akeneo added to Bitnami Library!

Akeneo is the latest winner of our monthly app contest, and is now part of the Bitnami Library! We are happy to announce that Akeneo is now available to download on Bitnami.

Akeneo is a Product Information Management (PIM) application designed to simplify your product management processes with a tool that helps centralize and harmonize all the technical and marketing information of your catalogs and products.

Thanks to their successful effort in encouraging their community to vote in the the Bitnami contest, Akeneo is now ready to install in a few clicks using the Bitnami installers, available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, Virtual Machine images (VMs) and cloud images for the Amazon EC2 and Azure clouds.
 
We also had  the opportunity to interview Frédéric de Gombert, CEO of Akeneo, who was kind enough to answer some questions about the project.

How was the Akeneo project started? What are the origins of this project?


The Akeneo journey really started in Las Vegas during the Magento Imagine Conference in May 2012. Yoav Kutner (former CTO & co-founder of Magento) and I were talking about what was really missing for merchants. We quickly agreed that CRM and PIM were major pain points for our clients. Not because there was no existing solution in the market but because those solutions were mostly closed-source, expensive and rarely designed for e-commerce needs. Six months later and with the help of a dream team including two other co-founders (Benoit & Nicolas), we were officially founding Akeneo. Our mission : building an open and intuitive PIM to help marketers struggling with spreadsheets and/or archaic tools. (Yoav also founded in the same time OroCRM but it's another story!)

What is the main goal for Akeneo?

At heart, Akeneo is an intuitive and super connected product information management software. But it is also a productivity tool : it means that our main goal is making product management much more efficient. Clients can centralize and push a product to a new channel much more quickly — on average, it takes 60 to 80 percent less time.

Which projects or organizations are using Akeneo currently? What kind of projects do they use it for?

We currently have more than 7 000 live installations of Akeneo in the world. It's a good start considering that the first stable version has been released in March 2014. We have very various kind of customers : fashion or luxury brands like Lancaster or Charlotte Olympia, large retailers like Auchan (largest supermarket chain in Europe with more than 1 600 supermarkets in the world), real estate companies, manufacturers, ... Every company selling products - virtual or physical, online or offline -  can find a good usage of Akeneo!

What do you expect will be the main benefits of having Bitnami packages available for Akeneo?

Two main benefits : ease the installation and evaluation process of Akeneo for non technical users and help them to find an efficient and cost effective hosting solution if needed. 



Would you like your favorite app to be part of Bitnami? Be sure to suggest and vote for it in our monthly contest