Ensim SDK Connects Hosting Features
By Anastasia Tubanos, theWHIR.com
August 24, 2006 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — As communication tools like email, voice over Internet Protocol and instant messaging converge, customers outsourcing these applications are beginning to demand a single host for those services. That host must combine them seamlessly into a single interface, enabling them to connect with one another.
Web hosting automation software developer Ensim (ensim.com) is hoping to provide the platform for that assembly with the recent release of its Unify Service Manager SDK, a software development kit that enables service providers and independent software vendors to integrate any application into the Ensim Unify platform and operate it as a hosted service.
“What we’re trying to do with Unify is to get them on a single platform to assist with these issues,” says David Wippich, CEO of Ensim. “There are about 15 pre-built services that run on the platform today, something we call a service manager, think of it as a connector between the provisioning platform and the application. Well, when we built Unify we did it in such a way that most of the brains of the software sit in the core platform, things like reseller management, delegated administration and all the provisioning logic and workflows. The connector, or service manager, is just the logic needed to interface to the particular application. So whether its Microsoft SQL Windows or Linux Web hosting, whatever the application is, we just need to know how to take that core platform capability and adapt it to the dials and knobs of that particular application. And so by doing that, we make it really easy to build those connectors because you don’t have to replicate all of the functionality that sits in the core.”
The SDK itself is a tool kit that enables third party companies to build a service manager, or connector, between an application and the unified platform. Wippich says the SDK isn’t difficult to use as long as you understand C Sharp, ASP and the DotNet framework. He adds that Ensim took great care to build the tool kit to be agnostic to the architecture of the application, and it can be used to adapt a Java-based, Linux or UNIX, or Windows-based applications.
“When it comes to building a service manager adapter, what we at Ensim try to do is understand that if we build a simple Web service interface to our platform, that becomes the easy part of the job,” says Wippich. “The hardest part of the job is understanding the application, and who better to understand the application than the company that developed it. So it’s really 70 percent application know-how and 30 percent Unify know-how and our job is to make that 30 percent as easy as possible.”
Wippich says deploying the SDK can enable service providers and ISVs to rapidly create new revenue streams by quickly creating and delivering new services to existing customers. It can lower the cost of operations by offering a large and growing number of services through a single platform. It helps achieve differentiation by adding new services, extend existing ones and creating bundles
Ensim says the platform includes more than 15 pre-built service managers created by the company over the past four years and run by more than 50 service providers worldwide.
The Service Manager SDK is currently available to Unify customers and qualified software vendors.
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