Merry Christmas !

The entire Cortex team wishes you a Merry Christmas!

Internet Solutions case study – the de facto interface for Hosted Exchange

When Internet Solutions (IS), South Africa biggest ISP, was looking for a new ‘cloud control panel’ to manage the provisioning and administration of hosted software applications, it conducted an extensive evaluation process before selecting Cortex. The choice was an easy one, says Neil van Straaten, Product Manager for Messaging Services. Cortex allowed the company to win more business, having a “wow” factor on the customers when they see the platform functionning.

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

Neil van Straaten, Product Manager for Messaging Services, Internet Solutions

Read the complete case study.

UTICA case study – Emphasizing Cortex flexibility

Last week we updated some of our case studies. This week, discover the one we wrote about our longstanding customer in the Netherlands, UTICA.

 

Established in 2003, UTICA offers a suite of services for business customers throughout the Benelux region. UTICA is one of the first providers in the Netherlands to offer a diverse range of Hosted Microsoft Services in a professional and flexible way by making use of extensive automation.

The Cortex provisioning platform’s ability to grow and change alongside a client business was a key feature that attracted this Dutch hosted services company to the solution.

“Cortex is freeing some valuable time. The time that we needed to manually manage the hosted business has been reduced by some 75% for Sharepoint, Exchange, BlackBerry, Web-hosting and FTP services.”

Haroun Debbabi, Technical Director, UTICA, Netherlands

Please read the full case study.

Cortex global number one for Hosted Exchange

Cloud computing software made by EMS Cortex – part of the Enprise Group – has become the number one interface for delivering Hosted Exchange, cutting deployment times by 70% and allowing resellers to provision new clients on the platform themselves in six clicks.

The company’s flagship product is Cortex, a cloud control panel software product used by applications hosting companies to manage hosted business applications, services and infrastructure. Cortex’s ability to automate the sale of additional services to existing customers, and uncap growth in the reseller market, have helped make it the world’s leading cloud control panel, says Enprise Group CEO Mark Loveys.

“Cortex is now the leading cloud control panel worldwide, based on sales growth and breadth and depth of functionality,” he says.

“We are supporting new Microsoft releases within 90 days, which is twice as fast as our competitors. This gives Cortex customers a significant head start in taking new hosted services to market. Our customers are seeing strong organic growth across all services from existing customers ‘helping themselves’ to additional services. Another major competitive advantage of Cortex is that it removes growth limits on the reseller market. Resellers provision new clients on the platform themselves, so their growth is completely unfettered.”

South Africa’s biggest ISP – Internet Solutions – is using Cortex software to differentiate its hosted services, automate the upselling of existing customers and uncork growth in its value added partner channel.

“Cortex is leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else – from an international perspective it’s the de facto interface for hosted Exchange,” says Neil van Straaten, Product Manager for Messaging Services at Internet Solutions.

“With Cortex our end users automatically configure their own desktops for speedy mass provisioning, which has cut deployment times by 70%. Client administrators have halved the time they spend administering existing users.”

Once clients are receiving one service, they deploy others by ticking a box. Clients upsell themselves, says Neil van Straaten.

“We’ve really noticed that once people are receiving hosted Exchange, as soon as they’re comfortable they tend to sign up for additional services,” he says.

“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’”.

He says Cortex has removed all growth restrictions for value added channel partners.

“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.”

Cortex has an international customer base ranging from small hosting companies with 5000 users to large Telcos with hundreds of thousands of users. Customers include TELUS of Canada and USA.NET, one of the worlds leading Exchange providers. Earlier this year Unisys selected Cortex for its new global cloud services platform. Cortex has a strong global partnership with Microsoft, and was the first cloud control panel to support Microsoft’s Dynamic Data Centre and Hyper V virtualization software.  Cortex was also first to market with support for SharePoint 2010 and the new Exchange 2010 SP1 hosting model introduced in August this year.

About EMS-Cortex
EMS-Cortex specializes in the development, sale, implementation and service of the Cortex suite of applications. Cortex is used by Telcos, ICT services companies, and specialist application hosting providers to manage the provisioning and administration of hosted software applications. Cortex automates the setup of hosted services and business applications; it allows end customers to perform day-to-day administration themselves and it provides a platform for managing all hosted services through a single interface. EMS-Cortex has blue chip local and international customers including TELUS of Canada; Internet Solutions, the largest hosting provider in South Africa;  Unisys Corporation and WebCentral, Australia’s largest web and application hosting company.

How to deliver a cloud desktop using XenApp 6

This is a great article on how to use XenApp 6 to deliver hosted desktops. http://community.citrix.com/x/7AAGCQ

Exchange 2010 SP1 Decisions

With the release of Exchange 2010 SP1, Exchange can now be installed in a “hosting” mode, this is the preferred and recommended approach for delivering shared Exchange 2010 hosting.  Note that this is a first release and a major product change, given this, some features are not supported and third party products such as Blackberry Enterprise Server will need to catch up.

We are committed to offer support for the hosting version of Exchange 2010, we are investigating how we can assist with migrating from existing hosting environments.  From September, Cortex will be able to concurrently support management of existing Exchange 2003 or 2007 forests alongside a new Exchange 2010 SP1 deployed forest.  This will enable new customers and users to be deployed onto the new Exchange forest while still maintaining existing legacy environments through the same control panel.

For customers who require features that are not supported by the hosting edition of Exchange 2010, Cortex provides multi-tenancy of Exchange 2010 enterprise using similar address list segregation techniques used to multi-tenant Exchange 2007.  If you require this option, you need to understand that Microsoft may not be able to offer support for your Exchange 2010 software should any issues arise –regardless of whether they are related to multi-tenancy.

The following table lists what is and isn’t available in the current versions of Exchange 2010, the intention is to help you make the right decision for your business. 

Feature/Benefit	Exchange 2007	Exchange 2010 Enterprise	Exchange 2010 SP1/Hosting
Native, Microsoft designed multi-tenant capability providing better security	No	No	Yes
Leverages experience gained from massive scale deployments such as live@edu	No	No	Yes
Microsoft supported Multi-tenancy	Yes	No	Yes
Compatibility with OCS 2007 R2	Yes	Yes	Not known
Compatibility with SharePoint 2010	Yes	Yes	Yes *
Compatibility with Citrix/TS delivery	Yes	Yes	Yes **
Support for public folders	Yes	Yes	No
Resource/User Forest (Linked Mailboxes)	Yes	Yes	No +
Sharing of Free/Busy information with other Exchange organisations (Federation)	Yes	Yes	No
Support for Unified Messaging	Yes	Yes	No
Sharing SMTP Domains across customers	Yes	Yes	No
Customer specific OU structure	Yes	Yes	No
Blackberry Enterprise Server compatible	Yes	Yes	No
Can deploy into existing Exchange Active Directory	Yes	Yes	No
Can be managed through Exchange Management Console	Yes	Yes	No
Upgrade possible from HMC or Exchange 2003	Yes	Yes	No ***
Organization management in Outlook Web Access (OWA) – Manage distribution groups, contacts, transportation rules and user mailboxes	No (handled through Cortex)	No (handled through Cortex)	Yes

* SharePoint 2010 testing in progress
**Citrix/TS testing in progress, limitations regarding OU’s may be an issue for some customers
***We are investigating an upgrade/migration process

New Position open at EMS Cortex

Internship Marketing and Business Developement Executive

Auckland, New Zealand

 

You love Technology and you are ambitious ?  You want to travel and discover a wonderful new country ?  You want to get real experience in a business-oriented marketing role ? Want to see the beach from your office ?

Come and work from one of the worldwide leading company in the ambitious new world of Cloud Computing based in Auckland New Zealand

Company Info

Founded in 1996, EMS-Cortex (EMS) is a global leader in systems management software. Cortex software is used by market leading Telco’s and Service Providers to deliver an increasing array of business software solutions from the cloud.

• Based in the wonderful city of Auckland
• Young and international company ( 7 different nationalities, 30 people )
• Successful and ambitious team : 100 % growth last year
• Cutting edge technology : Cloud Computing

Mission

You will work closely with the Marketing Manager and all the Sales Team. You will be responsible for executing Marketing and Communication actions

• Organize events worldwide
• Web Marketing : SEO, Blog Marketing
• Market analysis
• Design Sales Materials
• Work on the annual Marketing Plan

We expect you to be able to provide new marketing and communication ideas.

Profile

• Bachelor or Master in Business Science
• A previous experience in the BtoB or IT Marketing will be appreciated
• Fluent English spoken and written
• Other foreign language skills will be greatly appreciated

Personality

• Pragmatic and independent: Yes we will support you a lot but you will need to take initiative and manage your own projects
• Business-oriented: We expect our marketing actions to drive more sales. You should be focused on helping us to grow the business.
• Technology-savvy: We are a technological company so you must like technologies and be driven by innovation.

Conditions

• Salary : 2000 NZ$ / month
• 6 month minimum contract
• Beginning : ASAP
• Possibilities to get a full-time job if the internship is very successful
• Visa : we will take care of it
• Installation: We will help you settling down (airplane, car, housing…)

Application Details

• Send C V and Cover Letter to jctaunay@ems-cortex.com
• We will get back to you by email for a phone interview (don’t worry, you don’t need to come to new Zealand just for the interview)

Contacts Details

Jean-Christophe Taunay-Bucalo

Marketing and Sales Manager

jctaunay@em-cortex.com

Microsoft case study on EMS-Cortex

Microsoft have just published a case study on how EMS-Cortex delivered a great solution for delivering virtual servers using Hyper-V and System Center:

Hosters Deliver Virtual Servers in Minutes with Multitenant Management Console

Hosting with Exchange 2010 SP1

A beta version of Exchange 2010 SP1 was released earlier this month.  Although this carries the usual fixes and features we’ve come to expect from a service pack release of Exchange, SP1 comes with much awaited multi-tenancy capability.  SP1 has been re-architected to cope with some of the complexities required for sharing Exchange effectively and securely across lots of customers.

So, how does this differ from the HMC or the Cortex solution available for Exchange 2007 or 2003? – which also supports hosting.  The fundamental difference is that before Exchange 2010 SP1, we had to cleverly utilise the permissions system of active directory to secure one customers users and objects from another.  There were always limitations with this approach and it also involved making programmatic changes to active directory rather than using standard Exchange commands.

Exchange 2010 SP1 delivers real segregation of customers.  This is a major step forward.  As expected, this is an initial version and as such, some functionality is reduced when compared to the standard Enterprise edition of Exchange – as an example, Public folders and Unified Messaging are not supported features in the Beta release.

Due to the architecture changes in the product, there are schema changes and a new Active Directory structure that at present restrict Exchange SP1 from being readily deployed into an existing Exchange 2007 hosting environment.  There are also some unknowns around the best way to deliver Hosted Exchange 2010 alongside other services such as SharePoint 2010 or hosted desktops – these are all things we are working hard to solve.  EMS is committed to delivering a great solution for Hosting Exchange 2010, at present there are lots of unknowns so it’s hard for us to give an exact release date or to give a clear demonstration of how migrations may be achieved.

In the meantime, the Cortex functionality that allows hosting of Exchange 2007 has been successfully adapted to work with Exchange 2010 Enterprise edition and has been in production use for quite some time – this was intended to be used for dedicated Exchange customers, however this can be applied to deliver a similar shared hosting environment.  Note that deploying Exchange 2010 Enterprise edition in a shared hosting configuration is unlikely to be supported in any way by Microsoft should you need technical assistance.

As of about a week ago the beta of Exchange 2010 SP1 was released. This includes a hosting switch. The hosting switch allows for some great functionality – increased administrative capability within Exchange itself, enhanced security, scalability and a smarter way of segregating customers. This is the future of Hosted Exchange.

Given all of this, what do we recommend for the hoster that wants to offer Exchange 2010:

• If you have an existing 2007 environment and have no requirement for Public Folders or Unified Messaging we would advise waiting until SP1 is released and we have a clearer upgrade path. In the meantime, downloading and installing the Beta release of 2010 SP1 in hosting mode is strongly recommended.
• If you cannot use The SP1 hosting switch due to feature requirements you have the option to multi tenant exchange 2010 enterprise using Cortex. It is very important you understand the Microsoft support implications should you choose this path.
• If you are starting out today, this is a hard choice – wait 3 or so months for a fully supported version, or go live today on old technology (Exchange 2007) or unsupported (Exchange 2010 Enterprise). We can help you once you have made the decision – but this is not a choice we can make for you! 

Please call or email us or your Microsoft rep to discuss your options – we are here to help!

The New Managed Service Provider Model – Low touch, high volume

Scott Swanburg from Citrix has today posted an article on Cortex showing how you can deliver to high volumes of users without increasing your support costs.

http://community.citrix.com/x/bgSBC