South Africa’s largest Internet services provider (ISP) – Internet Solutions – is using Citrix® CloudPortal™ Services Manager to differentiate its hosted services, automate the upselling of existing customers and pave the way for explosive growth in its value-added partner channel.

When Internet Solutions was looking for a new cloud control panel to manage the provisioning and administration of hosted applications, it conducted an extensive evaluation process before selecting CloudPortal Services Manager. The choice was an easy one, said Neil van Straaten, product manager for messaging services. “CloudPortal Services Manager is leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else – from an international perspective it’s the de facto interface for hosted Exchange. We are winning more business now, and CloudPortal Services Manager is our biggest differentiator. Ease of use is something that clients can truly see and appreciate, and when we show clients the product interface, they say ‘wow’.”

Citrix set Internet Solutions up to do its own migration from a legacy hosted messaging & collaboration/Microsoft® Provisioning Server (HMC/MPS) engine, providing support as needed. “Migration of our 800 client organizations and 40,000 user mailboxes is proceeding smoothly,” said van Straaten. “There’s no impact on client service, no need to sit down with the client and go through changes. We tell the client about the cutover, but the only thing that changes for them is the admin URL. Everything else just keeps working.”

The sophistication of the CloudPortal Services Manager client interface means Microsoft® Exchange functionality is not lost – even with multi-tenant hosting. Configuration is another area where the Citrix solution has delivered big gains. Setting up desktops – with account settings and Microsoft® Outlook® client – used to be manual. Customers now log onto a user interface and download the configuration file, double-click on it and run it – it’s that simple. Internet Solutions can deploy hundreds of users in branches spread across the country in a single day. Once clients are receiving one service, they deploy others by ticking a box. Clients upsell themselves, noted van Straaten. “We’ve really noticed that once people are receiving hosted Exchange, they tend to sign up for additional services. Before CloudPortal Services Manager, we had no ability for clients to have one interface to provision different services – now we do.”

Internet Solutions is launching Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) soon, and will provision and manage it using CloudPortal Services Manager. “It has slashed deployment times by 70 percent. It’s our sole management interface for both administrators and users,” he said. Cortex’s interface is simple enough for small companies with no IT department to understand, yet offers “plenty of functionality” for large enterprise clients. Once Internet Solutions has provisioned the client, customers can do mass provisioning uploads themselves. Internet Solutions’ administrators are achieving time saving of 30 to 40 percent when adding new clients. “They can actually add a client in five or six clicks – it’s only the paperwork that still takes time,” van Straaten said.

Dynamic manuals inside CloudPortal Services Manager are pre-populated with unique identity details for each client. The manual walks the client through and automatically supplies any required technical identity information. “The manuals are excellent – the client doesn’t need to know any technical details at all,” commented van Straaten. He said his company is especially excited about the way CloudPortal Services Manager has removed all growth restrictions for value-added channel partners. “Our resellers can provision a new client on the platform themselves, in five or six clicks. We just sit back and let resellers deploy clients as quickly as they possibly can. We want to set up everyone as a reseller and let them go wild with the market. It’s very exciting for us.”