Posts Tagged ‘Cloud Control Panel’

Citrix acquires EMS-Cortex business

February 23, 2011

This week Enprise Group is very pleased to announce that the assets of EMS-Cortex (one of the businesses of the Enprise Group) were acquired by global technology leader, Citrix Systems Inc. Citrix has approximately 5,000 staff worldwide and annual revenues exceeding US $1.8 billion.

We are absolutely delighted with the deal and I think this is a very positive development for all stakeholders in EMS-Cortex including customers, staff, management, shareholders and investors.

Citrix has hired all of the staff from EMS-Cortex and intends to continue developing the Cortex Cloud Control Panel from Auckland New Zealand. The business unit will continue to be led locally by former EMS-Cortex General Manager, Colin Williams, who will in turn report directly to Bill Burley, a Citrix Vice President based in Florida, who is the General Manager of the Citrix Cloud App Delivery Group.

The Cortex Cloud Control Panel, which is used by Hosted Service Providers around the world to provision and manage Cloud applications, is now owned by one of the world’s most innovative and respected technology leaders.

Another outcome of this deal is that it will result in Citrix having a bigger presence in New Zealand in the form of a local development arm. I’m optimistic that this will result in a further New Zealand-based jobs and opportunities being created going forward.

It is great to see our investors, who include TMT Ventures and the NZVIF realise a great return on their investment in EMS-Cortex and the Enprise Group. The millions of dollars returned to them through this EMS-Cortex deal will no doubt end up being re-invested back into the New Zealand IT industry, creating further jobs and opportunities for New Zealanders.

I look forward to seeing the EMS-Cortex team and the Cortex Cloud Control Panel go from strength to strength as part of the global Citrix business. For my part, I shall now be focusing my energies on the remaining two great businesses of the Enprise Group; Enprise New Zealand and Enprise Software.

For Citrix’s perspective, refer to the blog of Vice President and General Manager, Citrix Cloud App Delivery Group, Bill Burley.

Enprise Press Release re EMS Cortex and Citrix

NZ Herald, 9th March 2011 – US giant shows the Lovey with buy out

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TELUS of Canada sees growth in hosted services double with Cortex

December 22, 2010

“Cortex typically supports new Microsoft releases within 90 days – which is twice as fast as our previous control panel vendor.”

TELUS hosted service customers are embracing the self-service capability provided by Cortex software. TELUS Customer Solutions is using the Cortex cloud control panel to support hosted Exchange, SharePoint, Microsoft Office Communications Server, and Blackberry Enterprise Server.

“Cortex is supporting TELUS’ strategy of differentiating itself in the market by giving customers the tools to combine new products with existing ones,” says Renaldo Scalabrino, Marketing Director TELUS Customer Solutions.

“We offer our customers the ability to add hosted Exchange to business Internet or Blackberry services, for example,” he says. “With Cortex self service,TELUS customers can add or remove users and select the services and service levels they want for each of their employees. These changes are automatically reflected in their monthly bill. Customers can try things on a smaller scale because it is so easy for them to self provision. Blackberry add-ons to email is one example: people are adding the Blackberry service to their existing email account. It’s a very good growth path.”

TELUS Case Study

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Why Cloud Service Providers are so Passionate about the Cortex Cloud Control Panel…

October 12, 2010

The EMS Cortex Cloud Control Panel has a rapidly-expanding customer base that now includes some of the leading and largest Cloud Service Providers from around the world.

This has not been achieved by spending a fortune on global marketing, but rather by a concentrated focus on quality, product innovation and good-old customer service.

Here are some recent quotes from Neil van Straaten of Internet Solutions, South Africa – one of EMS Cortex’s largest, market-leading customers;

“Cortex is leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else
– from an international perspective it’s the de facto interface for hosted Exchange.”

“We are winning more business now, and Cortex is our biggest differentiator. Ease of use is the thing that clients can truly see and appreciate, and when we show clients the Cortex interface, they say ‘Wow’”.

“There’s no impact on client service, no need to sit down with the client and go through changes. We tell the client about the cutover, but the only thing that changes for them is the admin URL. Everything else just keeps working.”

“We’ve really noticed that once people are receiving hosted Exchange, they tend to sign up for additional services. Before Cortex, we had no ability for clients to have one interface to provision different services – now we do.”

“Cortex has slashed deployment times by 70%. It’s our sole management interface for both administrators and users.”

“The manuals are excellent – the client doesn’t need to know any technical details at all.”

“Our resellers can provision a new client on the platform themselves, in five or six clicks. We just sit back and let resellers deploy clients as quickly as they possibly can. We want to set up everyone as a reseller and let them go wild with the market. It’s very exciting for us.”

These quotes are extracted from an EMS Cortex Case Study featuring Internet Solutions of South Africa.

For more information about the Cortex Cloud Control Panel, contact sales@ems-cortex.com

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“Single Pane of Glass” Provisioning in the Cloud is a powerful thing

April 25, 2010

The following is an extract from a Microsoft case study on American Cloud Service Provider NGenX and their use of the Cortex Cloud Control Panel and Microsoft virtualization.

To me, it shows what a powerful concept the “Single Pane of Glass” is when it comes to provisioning and managing services in the Cloud. The need for a portal to control all hosted services can even help drive underlying technology choices at the Service Provider.

For the full case study refer to www.microsoft.com

“The VMware environment allowed us to virtualize a good percentage of our infrastructure that we used for hosted application services to our customers,” says Spindt. “However, the VMware platform required a lot of manual intervention for us to provision servers internally, and it didn’t provide nGenX with any means of exposing to our customers any control over their systems.”

To make up for the shortcoming in regard to self-serve capability, nGenX deployed a provisioning solution from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner EMS-Cortex. The IT staff at nGenX uses it to provision servers, and nGenX customers use it as an interface to administer many of their virtualized workloads. “The provisioning solution from EMS-Cortex is key to our vision around cloud computing,” says Robert A. Bye, Executive Vice President and General Manager at nGenX. “We’d seen how the EMS-Cortex control panel benefitted our Exchange and data backup customers, and we thought it would work for building out our concept of cloud computing.”

nGenX envisioned a single console from EMS-Cortex that its customers could use to manage virtual and physical servers, applications, and other resources such as storage and network resources. “However, VMware did not interoperate well enough with the EMS-Cortex solution for us to get more heavily engaged in a cloud computing environment,” says Spindt. “There was also the cost factor. We needed to determine whether we should stay with VMware or find an alternative, more cost-effective virtualization platform that would integrate better with EMS-Cortex.”

Solution

To meet its goals, nGenX chose to use Microsoft virtualization technologies to support its new cloud computing service offerings, called Guardian Cloud, with EMS-Cortex technologies as the core of its Guardian Control Panel for automation and provisioning. The company is leaving its existing VMware solution in place for internal purposes.

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Cortex Cloud Control Panel Boosts Hyper-V Automation

April 15, 2010

Over the last few months, EMS-Cortex has tapped huge demand in the market for Hyper-V provisioning software. As a result, some of the world’s greatest Cloud service providers are now using the Cortex Cloud Control Panel for provisioning Microsoft Hyper-V virtual servers. Some of these service providers are listed below;

MHA Application Hosting – NZ (www.mhaltd.co.nz)
OBT – Australia (www.obt.com.au)
Cloudeon – Denmark (www.cloudeon.com)
Atos origin – Netherlands (www.atosinabox.com)
Integral networks – USA (www.integralnet.biz )
nGenX – USA (www.ngenx.com)
Bluefire (Dimension Data) – Australia (www.bluefire.com.au)

The Cortex Cloud Control Panel makes Hyper-V virtual server provisioning and management fast & easy via the same “single plane of glass” used to provision applications and services such as Exchange, SharePoint, XenApp, OCS, BlackBerry, SQL Server, Dynamics CRM, Terminal Server, IIS, DNS etc.

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Global Cloud Innovation born inside Telecom New Zealand

April 8, 2010

Telecom New Zealand has been in the news for all sorts of reasons over the last couple of months, but in my opinion the most interesting story has been overlooked…

The Cortex Cloud Control Panel started off its existence over ten years ago, as a set of provisioning services, management tools, security tools and reporting systems which were custom-built for Telecom New Zealand by a company called EMS-Global. Telecom NZ was a pioneer in the field of hosting business applications and services, which meant that much of what was needed to manage its offerings had to be custom-built.

Over the following years, a product called “Cortex” evolved out of the original collection of tools and utilities used at Telecom. Most of the code used in Cortex was re-written from the original VBScript to the more current VB.NET. The services company EMS-Global was reborn as the product company EMS-Cortex.

Today the Cortex Cloud Control Panel is used around the world by many leading Telco’s and Hosted Service Providers, including TELUS, USA.NET, FPWeb, Melbourne IT, Unisys and Atos Origin.  The list of products supported by Cortex has continued to expand and now includes; Exchange, SharePoint, Broadsoft, OCS, SQL Server, IIS, DNS, Virtual Servers, Backup Solutions, Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop, Terminal Services and more.

Every month, an average of five additional Service Providers from around the world, sign up for Cortex to manage their Cloud Offerings.

Telecom New Zealand remains a loyal customer of Cortex through its Gen-i business unit that uses the latest version of Cortex to manage its Cloud offerings, including Exchange, SharePoint and other hosted business applications.

Additionally, Telecom NZ is a significant shareholder of EMS-Cortex, through its investment in TMT Ventures, which owns a 60% stake in the company.

It could be said that Cortex, which was born in Telecom New Zealand, gives new meaning to the phrase “Land of the Long White Cloud”…

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Cloud Control Panel is the New Channel for Hosted Apps

March 29, 2010

Apart from the fact that global sales of the Cortex V8 Cloud Control Panel are at an all-time high, there is another aspect of this product that I find quite exciting. That is, the growing channel-to-market for hosted applications that is offered by Cortex’s expanding base of Cloud Service Providers around the world.

Cortex is used by Cloud Service Providers to provision and manage applications, services and infrastructure (such as virtual servers, web servers, back-up systems, DNS etc) that they deploy in their Clouds. Without Cortex, the Cloud Providers would either need to hire an army of system engineers to manually provision and manage their hosted offerings to their customers, or they would need to develop their own bespoke Cloud Control Panel. Cortex is popular because both of these alternatives are potentially very costly and involve significant business risk.

Not only is the base of Cortex users growing, but the base of supported applications is also growing rapidly. Cortex’s main “bread and butter” applications are Microsoft Hosted Exchange, SharePoint, Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop, MS SQL Server, MS IIS, MS CRM, Blackberry, Backup Agent and Hyper-V or XenServer. These are common to most Service Providers, but more and more the envelope is being stretched to include ERP, CRM, Accounting, Payroll, Hosted Office and other business applications.

Cortex provides an API/SDK, so that third parties can add support for other applications. Software companies around the world are realizing that getting their applications added to the Cortex application list gets them potential global exposure through Cortex’s expanding user base.

From another perspective; the increasing base of Cortex’s supported applications is also opening up new channels to market for its Cloud Service Provider clients. Cortex’s delegated-administration capability lets application resellers or channel partners have their own branded Cloud Control Panels from which they can provision and deploy hosted applications on demand – selling the services of the Cloud Providers in the process.

So I believe that the Cortex Cloud Control Panel is the connection between two worlds – the Cloud and Software Channel Businesses (such as ERP & CRM). Exciting stuff!

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