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Interview with Shay Mowlem, VP of Marketing and Alliances at Ensim

Tell us a little about your background. What industry experience do you have? And what did you do before Ensim?
As vice president of marketing and alliances, I am responsible for Ensim's worldwide marketing, business development, and product strategy. I joined Ensim Corporation from Portal Software, where I served as the vice president of product management and product marketing. During my six year tenure at Portal, I played a lead role in expanding Portal's footprint from an IP billing software startup to a dominant provider of Revenue Management solutions for the global communications and media markets. Prior to Portal, I was responsible for product management at Broadbase, where I joined at an early stage to define the product strategy and manage Broadbase's first product offering from initial design to general availability. I began my career at Oracle Corporation where I held various sales and marketing positions, including a lead product management role for Oracle's suite of text retrieval and natural language processing products.

What is the history of Ensim and what has led to your success in the hosting automation industry?
Ensim Corporation was founded in 1998 and is the leading provider of software solutions for the telecommunications and hosting industry, and endorsed worldwide by service providers who depend on Ensim to deliver next-generation hosted services. Ensim solutions combine Ensim's market-leading products, partnerships with leading software and service companies, world-class professional services, and years of industry experience.

Ensim has also been a Microsoft Certified Partner for more than three years and provides hosting automation expertise to extend Microsoft's software leadership to the hosting industry. Via a successful co-marketing and co-development agreement, Microsoft and Ensim have built a very successful model for providing software as hosted services that will fuel profits for service providers well into the future.

Tell our readers about Ensim, its features and capabilities.
Ensim products enable Service Providers to profitably create, control and deliver Web and application hosting through a multi-service delivery platform. Using patented technology, Ensim is the industry standard in software solutions for Web and application hosting.

With any Ensim hosting automation solution, service providers are able to:

· Accelerate their time to new revenue by enabling flexible service integration and a fast time-to-market
· Lower their ongoing operating and capital expenditures by establishing a predictable total cost of operations
· Empower their customers and resellers while lowering support costs through customer and channel self-management

The Ensim Product Line

Ensim's product line includes the Ensim Pro control panel software for professional Web hosting, and Ensim Unify, the industry's first multi-service delivery platform for Web and application hosting.
Ensim Pro, the industry's leading hosting automation software, easily transforms a server into a professional Web hosting business. Ensim Pro was designed to be the most extensible and secure hosting automation software available. Ensim Pro control panel software delivers comprehensive server and Web site management tools for small to medium-sized Web hosting providers that own or rent a dedicated server, or rent space on a shared server. Large service providers can also bundle the software with their dedicated server or virtual private server offerings.

Ensim Unify is the industry's first multi-service delivery platform for Web and application hosting It was designed to meet the needs of telecommunications or broadband providers, large hosting providers or IT outsourcers looking for a platform to automate the delivery of one or more hosted services, to sell direct or through a reseller channel. Providers can chose from pre-built Ensim Service Managers for Hosted Exchange 2003, Shared Web Hosting for Windows or Linux, MS SQL Database Services and Windows SharePoint Services, or work with Ensim's professional services team to build out integrations for any third-party application or custom service.

Do you have any other changes or additions planned for Ensim coming up this year?
Ensim believes that the future success of service providers greatly impacted by their ability to provide hosted solutions to their customers. By solutions we mean combinations of core services and value-added services that address specific customer needs. With Ensim, service providers have a single service delivery platform that enables this ability to provide hosted solutions to their customers and to continually adapt these solutions to changing market demands.

Over the course of this year, Ensim plans to develop (and enable 3rd party development of) custom services as well as many value-added services to compliment the core offerings we develop. We are also placing a high priority on improving the overall ability for customers and 3rd party developers to integrate with our product platforms.

How does Ensim fit into the hosting automation industry? What makes you different?
Over the past few years hosting providers have taken advantage of their direct relationships with customers and the declining costs of hardware to sell more services and add-ons. In the frenzy of delivering as many services as possible in a short amount of time, many providers are now left managing a growing number of users, running on multiple disparate applications and platforms.

The success of the service provider's business rests on the breadth and depth of their service offerings, and their ability to meet SLA's, deliver high customer satisfaction and maintain the lowest possible cost of operations. Achieving these goals can be a tall order when confronted with a multitude of applications to support, new services to integrate and a growing number of customers to satisfy.

Ensim's unique solution offering addresses these key issues via platform centralization, automation of provisioning, wholesaler enablement and flexible integration of new services.

How may customers Ensim currently have and what have you found to be the reason for their choice of Ensim?
Approximately 5000 global hosting leaders and more than half of the top 10 U.S. service providers in the industry rely on Ensim software to drive and grow their businesses. Over one million Web sites and five million mailboxes are hosted on Ensim software spanning both the Windows and Linux platforms.

Hosting automation leadership, proven technical expertise, a very satisfied customer base and solid backing from industry-leading partners like Microsoft and Hewlett Packard are just a few examples of why many service providers around the world have selected Ensim as their hosting solutions business partner.

What kinds of support do you offer?
We offer a range of Self Help Resources and full-service support options. These services are designed to help our customers to deploy and manage their Ensim solutions while minimizing their total cost of ownership.

Can you tell us more about these support mechanisms and to what lengths will you go to satisfy customer's needs?
Our mission is to provide comprehensive support and services that ensure maximum deployment availability for our customers.

Ensim offers 24/7 support via web-based and telephone services.

Ensim Support Self-Help Resources include the following:
· Knowledge Base - to search or browse through answers for known and resolved issues
· Forums - visit the Ensim-moderated forums
· Downloads - to access all Ensim Control Panel installers
· Technical Notifications - to sign up for notification of Updates, Security Vulnerabilities and Security Fixes
· Online Support - to request technical support from Ensim
· Feedback - to submit feedback or send us suggestions

The hosting industry has changed a lot in the last year, what predictions do you foresee for this coming year?
Traditional access and web hosting services are becoming commoditized, thereby driving growth in higher value services and application hosting

What was once an unproven segment, the Application Hosting market, is growing by leaps and bounds and is expected to exceed $1 billion by 2009. A delivery platform for multiple services is critical for service providers to keep cost of service development and delivery low and differentiate their offerings from their competitors.

Lastly, what is the web site you visit on a daily basis?
TheHostingNews.com, of course!