The company has signed a number of high-profile international customers including large data center companies and application service providers looking to automate the setup of hosted services and software applications.

Most recently, Internet services company Melbourne IT (melbourneit.com.au) rolled out Cortex, EMS-Cortex's provisioning platform, using the system in its WebCentral hosting business to help deliver Microsoft-based managed email service, Corporate Exchange, to large businesses.

EMS-Cortex GM Ivan Wells says it provisions a large number of Microsoft-centric solutions and is seeing growing interest from prospective customers as Microsoft releases applications ready for hosting and multi-tenanting, with the launch of Exchange 2007, Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.

"It makes complete sense for most larger businesses to buy these applications on a software as a service basis, which obviates complex setup and new investment in underlying hardware," says Wells.

The Cortex platform enables different customers to share the same application, which is known as multi-tenanting, both directly and through service providers. Cortex manages the secure provisioning of customers, users, contacts, distribution lists and public folders.

Melbourne IT plans to expand its software services portfolio in the future and extend Cortex to manage underlying applications, says West.