Bitnami Provides eXo Platform Enterprise with a 30% Increase in Conversion Rates

As many of you know, we recently announced our software partners program earlier this month. We have been working with commercial software partners to bring ease of deployment to their current and potential customers, and bring our users more amazing software to try!

With 14 partners in the program so far, we have seen a range of different success stories across a variety of unique applications. One of our partners, eXo Platform Enterprise, had a particularly interesting challenge that they realized could be overcome by partnering with Bitnami. So far, eXo has had great success with the partnership.

eXo Platform Enterprise combines collaboration, calendaring, content and document management, and other productivity tools with social features to provide a complete enterprise intranet. By providing all the tools that business users expect in a traditional intranet and then enhancing them with social graphs and activity streams, eXo Platform dramatically streamlines communication workflows and raises employee engagement.

But in 2014, the company realized that the heterogeneity of enterprise IT environments was making it hard for non-technical business users to install and try its application. Patrice Lamarque, Chief Product Officer, eXo Platform explains that “Bitnami offered people an easy way to allow people to install eXo in the cloud. We understood very quickly that using Bitnami would help us with our key problem of lowering the entry barrier for new users."

Since partnering with Bitnami, eXo Platform Enterprise has recorded a 30% increase in conversion from download to installation. They attribute the increase to the seamless installation experience their users now have with Bitnami’s local installers, VMs, and cloud images.

To read more about eXo’s success as a Bitnami Partner, see our case study.

Interested in trying eXo Platform Enterprise? Try Bitnami eXo Enterprise Platform installers, Virtual Machine images (VMs), and cloud images for Amazon EC2 and Google Cloud Platform right away.

For a limited time, you can try eXo Enterprise Platform and be entered to win a free Apple Watch! Find out more. 

Interested in becoming a Bitnami Software Partner? Visit our contact page here.

BitNami Customer Spotlight: Nimble Books

We are often asked about how people use BitNami Cloud Hosting. As with the cloud in general, there are a huge variety of use cases and our customer base is incredibly diverse - ranging from Fortune 500s to universities to solutions providers who rely on BitNami Cloud Hosting to host applications for their clients. This is part of a series of posts that highlighting a few BitNami Cloud Hosting customers and explaining how they are using the platform to save time, money and do things that they couldn't do before they had BitNami and cloud computing.


BitNami Customer Spotlight: Nimble Books

Nimble Books provides an online platform, Nimble Combinatorial Publishing (NCP), for automatically building and publishing e-books based on content that is open access, public domain, user-contributed and other data. The NCP content repository can access more than 10 million documents, which can be selected, combined, and annotated in an almost inconceivably large number of combinations and permutations.

In order to develop the platform and launch the business, the company had to build out its infrastructure and the application itself. Nimble first used BitNami Cloud Hosting to evaluate various applications for this purpose, including WordPress, MediaWiki, Magento, Solr and Redmine, running up to ten separate servers for development and testing purposes. The ability to quickly launch instances with a wide variety of applications made it easy for Nimble to evaluate the apps that would be the best fit for its needs.

After determining that Magento, an e-commerce platform, Solr, an enterprise search platform, and Redmine, a bug-tracking system, were the best fit for the company, Nimble put them all into production. The company is currently running three separate servers for these apps: one for the production store, one for failover and another for research and development. One of the many benefits that Nimble receives from BitNami Cloud Hosting is that it can spin up duplicate machines at will for both development and scaling purposes.

For Nimble Books, BitNami Cloud Hosting provides the foundational technology upon which the product and the company itself was built. The service enabled Nimble to rapidly develop its application without losing precious development time setting up and configuring development environments and provides ongoing value with its one-click server cloning feature, monitoring and automatic backup capabilities. In addition to powering the product itself, BitNami Cloud Hosting is used to host the bug-tracking system for the development team and the Solr-based search engine. According to the company's founder, Fred Zimmerman, BitNami Cloud Hosting provided "obstacle removal and acceleration", speeding time to market while eliminating the need to purchase or configure any servers.

A PDF of the complete case study is also available.

BitNami Customer Spotlight: Brescia University

We are often asked about how people use BitNami Cloud Hosting. As with the cloud in general, there are a huge variety of use cases and our customer base is incredibly diverse - ranging from Fortune 500s to universities to solutions providers who rely on BitNami Cloud Hosting to host applications for their clients. This is part of a series of posts that highlighting a few BitNami Cloud Hosting customers and explaining how they are using the platform to save time, money and do things that they couldn't do before they had BitNami and cloud computing.

BitNami Customer Spotlight: Brescia University College

The web development team at Brescia University College is responsible for developing and deploying new web applications for the university. Going through the process of requesting, ordering and setting up new servers could take weeks, slowing down new development projects. In addition to having to wait for new equipment, working with physical servers gave the team finite development resources, restricting their ability to experiment with new applications.

The Brescia University web development team turned to BitNami Cloud Hosting and Amazon Web Services to get fast, cost-effective access to servers for evaluation, development and testing projects, as well as for applications they only need for a short period of time. On-demand access to cloud resources allows the team to spin up new servers within minutes so that they can be productive almost instantly, while only paying for the compute resources they actually use. When a project is complete or an application is no longer needed, the team simply deletes the server instance.

The Brescia University College web development team counts BitNami as "a key component of [their] 'flexible cloud' strategy" due to the platform's ability to rapidly provision servers with popular open source applications, its one-click server cloning and automated backups. These features enable the team to deploy new servers with the apps they need in minutes, clone them to set up new development environments or test updates before putting them into production, and ensure that they always have complete copies of their servers available in the event they run into issues. As a result, the web development team gets access to the resources they need, when they need them, and is able to select, develop and deploy new applications more quickly. Because they only pay for the resources they use, they are able to achieve these benefits while staying within a limited budget. Dan Bashaw, a web developer for the university says that BitNami Cloud Hosting saves him a considerable amount of time, enabling him to "do [his] job without getting bogged down in server management and administration."

A PDF of the complete case study is also available.

BitNami Customer Spotlight: Promethius Consulting

We are often asked about how people use BitNami Cloud Hosting. As with the cloud in general, there are a huge variety of use cases and our customer base is incredibly diverse - ranging from Fortune 500s to universities to solutions providers who rely on BitNami Cloud Hosting to host applications for their clients. This will be the first in a series of posts that will highlight a few BitNami Cloud Hosting customers and explain how they are using the platform to save time, money and do things that they couldn't do before they had BitNami and cloud computing.

BitNami Customer Spotlight: Promethius Consulting

Promethius Consulting provides network maintenance and support as well as website development and application hosting services to small and medium-sized businesses. Alfresco is one of several applications for which Promethius provides custom development and hosting services. Initially, Promethius was hosting Alfresco on internal servers with a multi-tenant setup, but the company was unhappy with the performance and lack of flexibility that approach provided.

After evaluating several options, Promethius came to the conclusion that running their servers on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform (AWS) would give them the best combination of performance and flexibility. Promethius chose BitNami Cloud Hosting to automate and facilitate the deployment and management of their Alfresco servers on the AWS cloud.

Aaron Toops, Director of Managed Services for Promethius, says they chose BitNami because "We save time and money, so we can focus our development team on making our product better for the customer instead of manually managing and deploying instances. " Promethius takes advantage of BitNami Cloud Hosting's one-click deployment process, automated backups, monitoring and management tools to speed up their development and deployment processes, allowing them to deliver solutions more quickly to customers while reducing costs. One feature that Promethius finds especially useful is the ability to clone servers across different AWS accounts. This allows them to use a "gold image" - a version of BitNami's Alfresco application that includes their own customizations and improvements - to deploy new servers for clients on separate AWS accounts in one click.

Mr. Toops also appreciates the support he gets from the BitNami team, commenting that "BitNami has been a great partner, actively listening and responding to our needs as a customer. Their support is simply outstanding, attentive, timely, and vested in fixing any issues we encounter. "

With BitNami Cloud Hosting and AWS, Promethius has been able to build out a new line of business around the Alfresco Enterprise Content Management System without any capital expenditure. BitNami's automated deployment process saves Promethius valuable development time, allowing them to deliver solutions more quickly and efficiently to their growing customer base.

A downloadable PDF of the complete case study is also available.