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| Tom enjoying one of his favorite hobbies |
Meet one of the newest members of our team, Tom McCafferty, and learn why he choose to join the Bitnami Team as our VP of Marketing.
Why I joined Bitnami…
I’ve spent the bulk of my career in product marketing which means I’ve spent a lot of time telling stories to customers, prospects, writers, industry analysts and partners (anyone who would listen) about companies, products and technology trends. And most of the time, if done well, the narrative creates a grand perception of whomever/whatever the story is about. I’ve told stories of small startups disrupting industry giants, I’ve told stories of changing infrastructure dynamics, I’ve written extensively on the future of communications and the impact of virtualization, automation and cloud computing. The dirty secret of marketing is that more often than not, the stories are just that….stories. Ok, they are generally rooted in some truth or some future truth (roadmaps) but are rarely representative of the actual state of the product or company.
In the case of a startup, creating a meaningful story can be especially difficult. Most of the time the foundational elements are not fully covered:
1. Do they have proven product(s)?
2. Is there a market for their products? Have they identified it?
3. Do they have customers? Are they meaningful customers?
4. Are they making money? Is it a sustainable business model?
5. Are they innovating? Is there a future opportunity?
When a friend first introduced me to Bitnami, I was absolutely blown away by the story they have to tell. Not only are they the clear leader in application packaging, they’ve applied that expertise to delivering cloud-ready and cloud-native application catalogs for every leading cloud provider (check out the list) in the world driving over 1 million new deployments per month. And they’ve built a profitable and rapidly growing business doing that. They’ve also had the foresight to leverage their internal know-how in building and publishing applications to productize application packaging tools for enterprise developers and system integrators to help businesses on their cloud migration journey. If that weren’t enough, they’re also driving innovations in the container ecosystem with open source kubernetes projects centered on packaging and discovering applications as well. Those are just the things that I can share today, there is so much more to come.
As I complete my second week as VP of Marketing at Bitnami I’m collecting data on products and buyers (there are many), evaluating the landscape of competitors (there are few) and defining ways to hone the story here to continue the momentum and accelerate the success that this team has had to date. I’m used to being in a position where there are gaps in the answers to those 5 questions above, not great answers to all of them. I’m hesitant to say that this makes my job an easy one, but I can confidently say that I am extremely excited about the opportunity to help Bitnami tell their story to the world.
Interested in working with Bitnami and Tom? Apply for one of our open positions!
I’ve spent the bulk of my career in product marketing which means I’ve spent a lot of time telling stories to customers, prospects, writers, industry analysts and partners (anyone who would listen) about companies, products and technology trends. And most of the time, if done well, the narrative creates a grand perception of whomever/whatever the story is about. I’ve told stories of small startups disrupting industry giants, I’ve told stories of changing infrastructure dynamics, I’ve written extensively on the future of communications and the impact of virtualization, automation and cloud computing. The dirty secret of marketing is that more often than not, the stories are just that….stories. Ok, they are generally rooted in some truth or some future truth (roadmaps) but are rarely representative of the actual state of the product or company.
In the case of a startup, creating a meaningful story can be especially difficult. Most of the time the foundational elements are not fully covered:
1. Do they have proven product(s)?
2. Is there a market for their products? Have they identified it?
3. Do they have customers? Are they meaningful customers?
4. Are they making money? Is it a sustainable business model?
5. Are they innovating? Is there a future opportunity?
When a friend first introduced me to Bitnami, I was absolutely blown away by the story they have to tell. Not only are they the clear leader in application packaging, they’ve applied that expertise to delivering cloud-ready and cloud-native application catalogs for every leading cloud provider (check out the list) in the world driving over 1 million new deployments per month. And they’ve built a profitable and rapidly growing business doing that. They’ve also had the foresight to leverage their internal know-how in building and publishing applications to productize application packaging tools for enterprise developers and system integrators to help businesses on their cloud migration journey. If that weren’t enough, they’re also driving innovations in the container ecosystem with open source kubernetes projects centered on packaging and discovering applications as well. Those are just the things that I can share today, there is so much more to come.
As I complete my second week as VP of Marketing at Bitnami I’m collecting data on products and buyers (there are many), evaluating the landscape of competitors (there are few) and defining ways to hone the story here to continue the momentum and accelerate the success that this team has had to date. I’m used to being in a position where there are gaps in the answers to those 5 questions above, not great answers to all of them. I’m hesitant to say that this makes my job an easy one, but I can confidently say that I am extremely excited about the opportunity to help Bitnami tell their story to the world.
Interested in working with Bitnami and Tom? Apply for one of our open positions!