Ensim Rolls Out IP PBX Manager to Support UC Services

Ensim (News - Alert) Corp., a provider of automation and orchestration solutions for on-boarding, service catalog, provisioning, and management of users and organizations with business apps and services, has announced the release of its proprietary product, Ensim IP PBX (News - Alert) Manager.

According to the company, the Ensim IP PBX Manager provides provisioning and operations management automation, policy control and orchestration of administrative, operational and self-service activities for BroadSoft’s BroadWorks application server.

Following the product’s release, TMC (News - Alert) got in contact with Ken Philipp, vice president of sales and business development at Ensim, for his take on this new offering, and to update us on what else the company has been up to.

TMC: In simple terms, what exactly is “Ensim PBX Manager”? What does it do best, and why should a company invest in it?

Ken Philipp: The Ensim IP PBX Manager for BroadWorks is one of our many “Connectors” to the Ensim Automation Suite (EAS). EAS enables service providers and enterprises to deploy a complete, turnkey solution for marketplace, service catalog, provisioning, and chargeback / billing needs, with complete workflow orchestration and automation. The Connector itself enables all of the suite’s functionality to be used to automate, manage, simplify and enable complete self-service control of the BroadSoft (News - Alert) BroadWorks PBX system.

Using Ensim, service providers can offer a hosted unified communications solution that gives their customers the ability to self-select, order, and manage their subscriptions without requiring the help desk every time they need to add, delete or change a user, or modify a setting. By providing a simplified self-service management interface, Ensim enables service providers to offer a true cloud service to their customers at the lowest possible operating cost.

TMC: What else has Ensim been doing recently?

KP: In addition to enabling BroadSoft BroadWorks IP PBX automation and self-service, we’ve also launched a major addition to our platform. This is our complete BSS, which provides a complete turnkey solution for a number of workflow needs. We have also been maintaining our leadership position in providing support for all of the latest releases of Microsoft (News - Alert) solutions, like Exchange 2013, Lync 2013, and SharePoint 2013 applications. In addition, we have made a major investment in complete IaaS options for Microsoft System Center (2012 SP1 and now R2) for Hyper-V, as well as VMware vCloud and vCenter for ESXi. Most offerings today consist of deploying virtual machines with specific resources via a template-based model. Every time a new virtual machine is required a new order must be placed. Ensim supports this standard model as well as purchasing, deploying and management of a virtual data center, where a user orders a virtual data center (not individual virtual machines) based on overall capacity (CPU, memory, disk, etc.). Once that is purchased, an authorized user can deploy any available template and as many virtual machines within the purchased capacity of the virtual data center. 

TMC: What other new products do you have in the pipeline?

KP: We’re currently working on further developments to our Cloud BSS / Service Catalog solution for service providers, which will enhance brokering of services between ISV and service providers to enable a community to share and cross-sell services and solutions. In regards to IaaS product offerings, Ensim provides a complete marketplace, service catalog, ordering, provisioning, orchestration, administration, and billing solution for multiple hypervisors such as Hyper V, ESXi, Xen, and KVM, managed by VMware vCloud Director, vCenter / vSphere, Microsoft System Center (2012 SP1 & R2), and soon Open Stack. We offer a simplified and universal interface for hypervisor management.

TMC: What do you offer that your competition does not?

KP: Ensim’s major advantage is that we have an end-to-end turnkey modular solution. This means we can cover everything from the website shopping page, to ordering, catalog, billing, provisioning, and management. Being modular, we can provide only the functions needed, such as just billing or just provisioning. In addition, we can easily integrate to any existing systems and utilize those functions and provide complete orchestration of the entire lifecycle process. We are differentiated from our competition in that we enable service providers to rapidly enter the ITaaS space with multiple, fully automated offerings and an open catalog that enables a provider to sell any solution and have detailed control over product bundling and customer roles and rights, which are essential for large-scale cloud deployments.