Posts Tagged ‘EMS-Cortex’
November 18, 2014
Enprise Group and its team have a strong track record in building valuable businesses. Here are some high-profile, high-value businesses that form part of Enprise’s value-creation history.
PC Direct (1989–1998)
PC Direct manufactured, distributed and supported personal computers under its own brand in New Zealand. Its sales channel was the direct, phone-based, channel by-passing the reseller network. Growth of PC Direct to become the #1 reseller of desktop computers in New Zealand was leveraged off the company’s integrated system – linking design, inventory, production, sales, despatch, service and accounting. The systems developed by PC Direct provided one of the company’s main competitive advantages.
Enprise CEO Mark Loveys, Enprise CFO Elliot Cooper and Enprise Datagate COO Steve Southon were all members of the executive management team of PC Direct and all made significant contributions to building the automated systems of the business.
Business sold in 1996 for NZ$ 27M
Exonet (1998-2000)
Exonet was an ERP software company founded by Mark Loveys, Maurice Bryham and David McKee Wright that developed the Exonet suite of business software that is the top-selling mid-market ERP in Australia and New Zealand, owned by MYOB and known as MYOB EXO. Enprise Solutions is the top reseller of MYOB EXO in New Zealand with sales offices in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Sydney and Melbourne.
Enprise CEO Mark Loveys was a founder and original developer of Exonet. Enprise CFO Elliot Cooper was CFO and a product designer. Enprise Datagate COO Steve Southon was Development Manager.
Business sold in 2000 for A$ 30M
Datasquirt (2000-2011)
Datasquirt was a Cloud software company that developed a non-voice multi-channel messaging solution for corporate contact centres. Datasquirt floated on the ASX in 2007 and had offices in Auckland, Sydney and London. The business was sold in 2011 and the remaining listed shell acquired the Enprise businesses, renaming itself to Enprise Group Ltd.
Enprise CEO Mark Loveys was a founder and original developer of Datasquirt. Enprise CFO Elliot Cooper joined as CFO. Enprise directors Lindsay Philips and Jens Neiser were directors and investors in Datasquirt.
Business sold in 2011 for US$ 12.5M
EMS Cortex (2006-2011)
EMS Cortex was a Cloud software company that was acquired by Enprise in 2006 for NZ$ 2.52M as part of an investment in Enprise by TMT Ventures. EMS Cortex created a Cloud Control Panel for provisioning Cloud Software. Key customers were Telecom NZ, Telus of Canada, Melbourne IT and other major Telcos & Hosting Companies around the world
Enprise CEO Mark Loveys and Enprise CFO Elliot Cooper were CEO and CFO respectively, while EMS Cortex was a division of Enprise.
Business sold in 2011 for US$ 11.5M
The Future
Today our focus is on building the businesses of Enprise Group, which are Enprise Solutions, Enprise Software and Datagate Innovation.
Enprise Group Ltd will be listed on the NZAX stock exchange under the code “ENS” from Monday 1st December 2014.
Posted in Cortex, Datagate, Datasquirt, ERP, MYOB EXO, New Zealand IT Industry, Sap Isv | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Datasquirt, EMS-Cortex, Enprise, Enprise Group, EnpriseAU, EnpriseGroup, EnpriseNZ, EnpriseSW, Exonet, MYOB EXO, PC Direct
April 3, 2014
Mark Loveys and Tim Mulcock
This week Enprise announced its acquisition of Datagate Innovation Limited, which is a Cloud Software Developer that specializes in on-line reporting and billing portals for Hosted Service Providers, Telco’s and Utility Companies.
Following the acquisition, Datagate’s founder, Tim Mulcock is staying on to lead Datagate in the role of Managing Director and he also becomes a significant shareholder in the wider Enprise Group.
Prior to founding Datagate, Tim was a co-founder of EMS Cortex, a global Cloud Control Panel provider for the Cloud/hosting industry – which was acquired by Enprise and subsequently sold to Citrix Corporation in 2011. Tim also has extensive industry experience, gained from working within Telecom New Zealand and also as a co-founder of Bizo – a New Zealand hosted service provider that was later sold to Orcon.
I’m enthusiastic about the synergies between Datagate and Enprise. Datagate will leverage Enprise’s extensive international contacts within the hosting industry (from our time with EMS Cortex) and also leverage our strong background in Business Management and ERP Software. Already, Datagate and Enprise Solutions are talking in unison with common potential customers.
Enprise will also benefit from Datagate’s laser-sharp industry focus on Cloud and Hosted Service Providers – which is a strong global market vertical that Enprise can apply to its international sales channel and ERP-based partnerships.
Specialisation is so important when you’re operating in the large global markets. This will be a strong new focus for Enprise.
Posted in Cloud, Cortex, Datagate, ERP, Multi-tenant, New Zealand IT Industry, Virtualization | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Citrix, Cloud, Datagate, Datagate Innovation, EMS-Cortex, Enprise, Enprise Group, EnpriseGroup, Portals, Telecom New Zealand
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
Posted in Cloud, Cortex, Multi-tenant, Virtualization | 1 Comment »
Tags: Citrix, Cloud, Cloud Control Panel, Cortex, EMS-Cortex, EnpriseGroup
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
Posted in Cloud, Communication, Cortex, Multi-tenant, Virtualization | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Cloud, Cloud Control Panel, Cortex, EMS-Cortex, Hosted Applications, Hosted Exchange, Hosted Service Provider, Hosted Services, TELCO, TELUS
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
Posted in Cloud, Cortex, Multi-tenant, Virtualization | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Cloud, Cloud Control Panel, Cortex, EMS-Cortex
August 20, 2010
Here is some great customer feedback that our team at EMS Cortex received today from Eric Malatesta of Venyu, a valued Cortex Service Provider based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who has started using the Cortex Cloud Control Panel to manage their hosted services.
First, what an awesome product. Cortex Provisioning has been all I could imagine, and more!!!!!!!!! We are having a lot of success with this product, and our clients love the easy to use interface. My administrators are loving it as well, and have little need to ever log into the backend servers at all. I think of this product as the beginning to a lot of my other projects.
Thank you for the kind words Eric and congratulations to the team at EMS Cortex.
Posted in Cloud, Cortex, Multi-tenant, Virtualization | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Cloud, Cortex, EMS-Cortex, Hosting, Venyu
June 18, 2010
EMS Cortex has always supported and been a strong advocate of Citrix products and technology because we believe that a truly successful Cloud strategy requires that ALL of a business’s applications reside in the Cloud – not just some of them.
Given that so many business applications are based on Microsoft Windows and given that Citrix is the technology & market leader in delivering scalable, efficient and reliable remote access & virtualization to Windows applications and desktops, it’s hardly surprising the so many of our Service Provider partners are also Citrix Service Provider partners.
We see our product Cortex as the “Single Pane of Glass” that provisions and manages all of the popular Microsoft applications (such as Exchange, Sharepoint, CRM, OCS etc) along with the nearly infinite list of applications that can be delivered using Citrix XenApp technology.
During the last couple of months, EMS Cortex has been working more closely with Citrix and in particular with Scott Swanburg, who heads the Citrix Service Provider program.
See what Scott and Citrix Engineers have to say about EMS Cortex in this Blog.
Posted in Cloud, Cortex, Multi-tenant, Virtualization | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Citrix, Cloud, Cortex, EMS-Cortex, Hosting, Service Providers
May 17, 2010
EMS Cortex is one of five technology partners included in the Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Alliance, along with NetApp, Compellent, F5 and EMC.
This is a program designed to bring together an ecosystem of partners including hosters, system integrators, hardware manufacturers and software vendors who partner with Microsoft to offer rich and differentiated value around the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Hosters and the Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center.
Dynamic Data Center Alliance
Posted in Cloud, Cortex, Multi-tenant, Virtualization | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Cloud, Cortex, EMS-Cortex, Hosting, Microsoft, System Center, Virtualization
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.
Posted in Cloud, Cortex, Virtualization | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Cloud, Cloud Control Panel, Cortex, EMS-Cortex, Hosting, Hyper-V, Microsoft, nGenX, Provisioning, Virtualization, VMware
April 22, 2010
Speaking as someone who is involved in the global SME ERP Industry through Enprise NZ and Enprise Software, involved in the Cloud Control Panel & Hosting industry through EMS-Cortex and involved in the Business Messaging and Social Media Industry through Datasquirt; here is my prediction of how ERP Software will be sold in the new decade that we are now entering;
Sales Process
- Firstly, the prospective customer will search the Internet for an ERP Solution and ERP Reseller that look suitable for their type of business. This will involve the use of a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo and would include searches of web sites and various Social Media including Twitter, Linked-In, YouTube, Facebook and others.
- The prospective customer will then contact the ERP Reseller via Email, Instant Message, Voice Call or Social Media Tweet, asking for more information and a demonstration of the ERP solution.
- An initial consultation/discussion will follow via Email, Voice Call, Social Media etc to determine whether the fit between the ERP Solution and the customer requirements is such that a product demo is warranted.
- The ERP Reseller will then set up a temporary demonstration ERP solution in the Cloud using their own portal in the Cortex Cloud Control Panel. The demonstration system would be a clean installation of the ERP demo, complete with its own clean virtual database server and (optional) desktop environment. The exact solution, including add-on industry vertical components and temporary user accounts can be selected and configured in the Cortex portal. This demo system would be provisioned, up and running within minutes of being requested on the portal and would be set to last for a predetermined duration for the purposes of the demonstration.
- The ERP Reseller would then either visit the prospective customer and demonstrate the ERP solution on-site (geography permitting) using a computer connected to the Internet or will demonstrate via a web meeting tool such as GoToMeeting or WebEx.
- The prospective customer might then want to spend further time trying out various aspects of the demonstration system after the ERP Reseller has finished demonstrating it. If the ERP Reseller agrees to this then they can arrange for the demonstration system to be kept alive in the Cloud for a longer duration to enable the prospective customer to continue with their own trial use of the system.
- If/when the prospective customer decides to purchase the ERP system, the ERP Reseller would go back into their portal on the Cortex Control Panel, delete the demonstration system and configure a new live ERP system. The company and user names would be entered into the Cortex portal and also any additional up-sell items would also be included, such as Exchange Email accounts, SharePoint, Blackberry, VOIP accounts, Backups, Firewalls, Hosted Desktops (eg XenApp, XenDesktop), Payroll Access etc.
- Application licensing information would be sent via Web Services to the respective vendors (eg Microsoft, Citrix, SAP, MYOB etc) and licences would be generated and applied back to the new hosted system via web services.
- The Cloud-delivered ERP solution is now live, up and running. The ERP Reseller’s consultants can now access the system to configure the ERP Solution to the requirements of the customer.
- The ERP Solution is now live in the Cloud and can be accessed from anywhere via the Internet. This includes all the branch and home locations of the customer as well as the ERP Reseller and the ERP and other software vendors.
Applying Upgrades and Patches to the ERP System
Prior to a new upgrade or patch being applied to a live ERP system, it must be tested against the individual customer’s data and processes to ensure that the software changes work correctly and cause no disruption to the business.
To enable this testing process, the ERP Reseller will go into their portal of the Cortex Control Panel and request a temporary test copy of the live ERP Environment. This enables the ERP Reseller’s consultants, in conjunction with the customer’s staff, to test the new software version and identify any possibly reconfiguration issues on the test system.
Once the testing process is completed and signed off, the ERP Reseller can go back into their portal of the Cortex Control Panel and apply the upgrade to the live system. They can also delete the test system when they are finished with it.
Support
Support of the ERP System by the ERP Reseller and the ERP Vendor is a lot easier, more efficient and less costly under this new model for the following reasons;
- Because the ERP System and its virtual operating environment was provisioned by Cortex, it would be done the same every time, using best practices, using the correct program versions and configuration. These things are therefore known to the support personnel and not subject to variation.
- The support personnel have quick and easy remote access to the hosted ERP solution (subject to permission from the customer to access their system and data).
The model works better for everyone involved in the ERP system sale. The customer, the ERP Reseller and the ERP and other software vendors.
The Customer gets:
- Extended Access to a Demo System
- Reduced Capital Outlay
- Faster Implementation
- Reduced management overhead of looking after local server & infrastructure
The ERP Reseller gets:
- Up-sell opportunities
- Faster Implementation – freeing up time to sell more!
- Repeatable Cookie Cutter implementations
- Easier to Support
The Vertical Solution Vendor gets:
- Opportunity to list solutions on the Cortex Portal
- Easier Support on a Known Environment
The ERP Vendor gets:
- Faster Implementations = More Sales
- Easier & Less Expensive Support
- Better Product Performance in a Correct Known Environment
Posted in Cloud, Communication, Cortex, Datasquirt, Enprise Job Costing, ERP, Multi-tenant, MYOB EXO, SAP Business One, Sap Isv, Virtualization | 1 Comment »
Tags: Citrix, Cloud, Cortex, Datasquirt, EMS-Cortex, Enprise, ERP, Hosted ERP, Microsoft, MYOB, MYOB EXO, SAP, SAP Business One
Mark Loveys 