Our September Bitnami Power User: Bob Stolzberg

We sat down with Bob Stolzberg of CenturyLink, a Principal Engineer (and avid fan of Bitnami's JBoss and Tomcat Blueprints) whom we worked with closely during our Bitnami Blueprints launch on the CenturyLink Cloud. After learning about our ‘Power Users’ monthly feature he contacted our COO directly to express how much he loves Bitnami resources. Naturally, we jumped at the chance to offer Bob our September Power User spot!

Bob is the ultimate evangelist. If there is ever a chance to utilize our web apps and stacks on a daily basis around the CenturyLink office he is the first one to recommend us. Check out a helpful blog post he recently authored, “Spinning Up Servers and Performance Monitoring in Minutes.”

He kindly got on the phone to walk our team through CenturyLink’s amazingly optimized Cloud Platform where our Bitnami Blueprints live. It’s incredibly easy for CenturyLink fans to navigate and deploy Bitnami Blueprints on their cloud platform, which made them a natural fit for a Bitnami partnership. The Bitnami Team is stoked to present Bob’s Power User Q&A. Read on and learn more about one of our favorite CenturyLink engineers, Bob Stolzberg:

What is your occupation? 

Principal Engineer at CenturyLink

What are your hobbies? 

In my spare time I enjoy hunting, fishing, metal detecting and spending time with my family.

Why did you start using Bitnami, and for what purposes? 

I started using Bitnami to automate the installation and configuration of a stack through Blueprints on the CenturyLink Cloud. A developer can rapidly ‘spin-up’ a LAMP stack (for example) in a low-cost environment, craft a blueprint that calls the Bitnami Blueprint as a base (everything is scalable and interactive), and have their customer information automatically configured every time. It’s very apparent that, much like CenturyLink, Bitnami is focused on speed and productivity.

What projects are you currently working on? 

Lots. :) Recently, I was involved in the task of helping to integrate Bitnami Blueprints with the CenturyLink Cloud. The magic of [CenturyLink’s] control panel is that you can easily/quickly configure and download Blueprints in under 1 minute. It was a fun project to work on as I’m a personal fan of both.

Do you have any favorite stacks/apps in the Bitnami Library? 

LAMP, MEAN, WAMP, Magento, Piwik, WordPress. Most recently I deployed Piwik to share project updates with a small team of developers and contractors inside CenturyLink.

How do you evangelize the Bitnami brand to peers/friends? 

I tell all of my friends and coworkers about Bitnami whenever I’m provided the opportunity. Just makes life simple and incredibly easy to install software.

We love to hear hear from our users, and we would love to hear about your personal experience with Bitnami as well. Feel free to reach out to us, and you might just be the next Bitnami Power User!

Mautic Joins the Bitnami Library to Provide Professional Marketing Automation

Mautic is the world's most popular open source marketing automation tool, and it is now available on Bitnami. Handle advanced drip campaigns, as well as generate leads, perform email marketing, and build landing pages all with the newest addition to the Bitnami Library.

Mautic’s powerful, easy to use automation tools help every marketing campaign become a success. With the Bitnami Mautic stack, you have access to:

• Lead Management: Monitor and track leads across websites, build lead profiles, measure your leads and move them automatically. 
• Email Marketing: Build and send emails to your leads, using your preferred email server or your own server.
• Drip Campaigns: Create advanced automated drip campaigns easily with a drag-and-drop interface.
• Landing Pages: Build beautiful landing pages through an easy-to-use page builder.
• Web Forms: Develop powerful lead generation forms to use in landing pages or inject into your website pages.
• Page & Email A/B Testing: Test alternative layouts, weight and automate winners.
• Reporting: See what works and what doesn't, build your own reports.

Try the Bitnami Mautic application below, and see how easy it is to get started with your next marketing campaign!

Or you can start using Mautic right away with our Bitnami Mautic installers, Virtual Machine images (VMs), and cloud images.

Once you’ve tried it, make sure to leave a review on their page! We’d love to hear about your experience.

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.