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CommentsEMS-Cortex has announced release 8.1 of their premier SaaS delivery Platform. The new release has a focus on enhancing service provider’s ability to acquire new customers and up-sell higher value services to existing customers. Uptake for the new features has been incredible. The addition of a new SDK for ISV’s will be followed by several exciting new partnerships that will be announced over the coming months.
Cortex is now established as the most powerful and flexible SaaS delivery platform for service providers. It includes support for 13 of the most popular hosted applications out of the box including Exchange, SharePoint, OCS and Terminal Services. Cortex allows customers to manage their own services, reducing helpdesk costs, and delivering improved customer retention – a key factor in today’s troubled economic times.
Version 8.1 now includes Web-Shop functionality. This allows service providers to have an ecommerce presence for their services within hours of Cortex being installed. Sales Manager Daniel Thurston says the focus on customer acquisition for service providers is a key way for EMS-Cortex to help Service Providers grow their business. “We estimate the cost savings by providing a fully content manageable and customizable Web-Shop integrated with the Cortex platform to be over $15,000 US, and the expected revenue generated to be twice that over a twelve month period.”
In the vein of customer acquisition the Cortex platform now has the ability for customers to import their own PST files into the hosted Exchange service. This reduces the complexity of acquiring new customers as this is now a no-touch process. In addition comprehensive email notification support has been added, any event within Cortex can generate an email event which can be sent to multiple parties, Daniel says an obvious example, is in delivering help files to customers signing up to new services. With our new email notification whenever a customer or user acquires a new service, setup and help documentation can be automatically emailed directly to them. Again this is a no touch process, reducing help desk intervention and increasing the likelihood of the customer purchasing new services.
Another area of business EMS-Cortex has seen growing strongly is the MSP (Managed Service Provider) market. The Cortex platform has the ability to manage all 13 services offered in multiple Active Directories, Managed Service Providers are finding these unique features incredibly attractive. Colin Williams GM of EMS-Cortex points out that a lot of startup hosting companies already offer managed services for numerous businesses, all with their own environment. Using the Cortex platform allows them to create a new shared hosting environment, and with no additional hardware or software investment, using the Cortex Platform to give all of the existing dedicated customers the benefit of delegated administration. This not only reduces help desk costs but also gives end-customers a marked improvement in service levels as MACS no longer need to wait for the help desk to resolve issues.
The Cortex Platform SDK allows Service Providers and ISV’s to integrate additional services into Cortex with minimal cost. The benefit to ISV’s is that once they are integrated any service provider using Cortex can start selling their software. The Cortex Web-Shop, provisioning engine, comprehensive reporting and delegated administration interface take care of the heavy lifting, making publishing additional applications into Cortex a simple exercise. Service providers can also rely on Cortex being a market leader, keeping up to date with market leading Microsoft applications including Exchange, OCS and IIS7, and encouraging third parties to integrate creating opportunities for everyone to make money.
EMS-Cortex has seven new customers signed up to this release, and over half of their existing customer base has been upgraded or been scheduled in. “This is our most popular release ever. We have never had such an immediate response from so many people, and we are glad that so many of our existing and potential customers agree – this is the year of the customer. Retaining their business and selling new services to them is a greater priority than ever before.” says Thurston, “This year looks to be very successful for EMS-Cortex”
About EMS-Cortex
Ems-Cortex is a market leading software development company that has been working in the SaaS space for over 10 years. The flagship Cortex Platform has a broad spectrum of customers from some of the world’s largest hosting and Telecommunication companies to MSP’s starting a hosting business.
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