MSPAlliance recently had the opportunity to ask Ensim CEO, David Wippich, some questions about his organization and how they are working with managed service providers.
What products and/or solutions does Ensim offer MSPs?
The Ensim Automation Suite (EAS) enables complete automation and orchestration of marketplace, subscriptions, service catalog, provisioning, billing, and operations, with self-service on-boarding and management, of users, organizations, and channels for business applications, services, and infrastructure. Enabling enterprise users and admins with self-service ordering and management capabilities via an easy to use web portal can drive higher demand for the services offered while lowering the MSP’s operating cost. Increased revenue, lower operating cost and higher customer satisfaction can be easily achieved by leveraging Ensim solutions.
EAS enables MSPs and other service provider and enterprise users to extend and enhance existing systems to minimize costs, deployment time, user disruption and business risk. EAS easily overlays existing platforms and integrates with back office systems like IDM, CRM, ERP, BI, or other OSS and BSS platforms. As a complete turnkey system, EAS can be deployed stand-alone or as a fully integrated end-to-end solution or replace existing ordering, service catalog, billing, provisioning, and management platforms.
Ensim Automation Suite includes the service and application connectors (including the latest versions of Microsoft Lync, SharePoint, Exchange, VMware vCenter and vCloud, and Microsoft System Center / Hyper-V– just to name a few) which enable all of the automation functionality of Ensim’s platform for ordering, catalog and billing to also be fully leveraged for fine grain provisioning and operations management to control any application, service and infrastructure component connected through standard web service APIs, whether multi-tenant or single tenant, on-premise, SaaS or cloud services.
Meeting enterprise security and compliance requirements is critical to MSPs looking to provide public, private or hybrid cloud services for mission critical applications and infrastructure. Ensim provides all the capabilities necessary to meet the MSPs’ needs, including delegated administration, role and rights management, detailed logging for audit and reporting, and help desk / operations / self-service automation – all functionalities that are important for MSPs looking to differentiate and provide solutions at a competitive price.
With what types of MSPs does Ensim traditionally interact?
Ensim can support organizations of all sizes and across many vertical markets. In terms of MSPs, we typically interact with medium to large sized ones; about 60% of our MSP customers are based in the US and 40% in ROW.
Ensim primarily works with the value added MSPs or those looking to offer additional services (ITaaS) to their client base. Based on current market demand, more and more SMBs and enterprises are looking for their IT services to be delivered from a cloud model as opposed to a traditional managed services model. Ensim enables MSPs to rapidly support the new cloud model and serve existing clients in the mode they are requesting (managed or cloud) and enables automation solutions in either model to increase MSP profitability.
What are some of the challenges MSPs face when implementing a set of cloud based services and products?
MSPs need to quickly launch offerings today with the ability to continue to grow and customize into the future. Many cloud offerings can only be profitable with full automation and self-service capabilities. If the MSP takes too many calls on a solution, they will go into the negative. Ensim solves these issues for service providers, enabling them to quickly launch with fully automated services, combined with self-service interfaces to ensure fast rollout and high margin returns.
Subscription billing systems that many MSPs traditionally use are unable to support the granular product modeling necessary for cloud service delivery and cannot track and consequently bill for all the various elements that comprise an offer, thus causing the provider to miss out on revenue opportunities. Ensim Automation Suite, on the other hand, supports the provider’s cloud marketplace and all related processes and has the workflow orchestration intelligence to understand how to bring together services with subscriptions in the same order, in the same offer, and in the same model.
EAS is easy to install, integrate with existing systems, and customize to meet the MSP’s specific needs and demands, truly helping them to overcome whatever challenges they face.
Can you discuss any success stories or case studies involving MSPs who have successfully deployed Ensim technology in the furtherance of their cloud practice?
Most of our specific cases are under NDA but I can say that Ensim’s solutions have been deployed across a broad range of organizations of varying shapes and sizes around the world with over 300 major deployments in over 30 countries. One example of a successful deployment is an MSP which services medium-sized enterprises in healthcare, legal and financial services with critical security and compliance requirements. Other Ensim customers include Xerox/ACS and NaviSite.
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) recently selected the Ensim Automation Suite to automate, provision and manage VMware vSphere in conjunction with HDS’ Unified Compute Platform (UCP) and Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) family to enable IaaS offerings for enterprise and service provider deployments.
What advice do you have for MSPs who are considering starting or expanding their cloud practice?
Ultimately, for an MSP to adopt a model that allows its offerings to be delivered via the cloud it requires a major overhaul of its existing processes, as well as the technology that supports them.
To succeed in today’s landscape, the software solution that an MSP chooses to support its cloud marketplace and all related processes must have the workflow orchestration intelligence to understand how to bring together services with subscriptions in the same order, in the same offer, and in the same model.
While many providers focus on the back end infrastructure, networking, storage components of offerings, MSPs require BSS/OSS technology (ordering, catalog, billing, provisioning, operations) solutions that allow them to rapidly develop flexible, robust product models in order to give customers what they want, how they want and to be able to determine and multiply usage amounts by pricing in order to accurately bill for even the most granular of elements in an offer. Having a single, fully automated platform that supports all BSS/OSS functionalities, enables a robust, open service catalog and supports customer self-service as much as possible is the key.