If you are a service provider you know time to market is key and anything you can do to shorten this is worth exploring. Now what if I told you there is a vendor who wants to speed your time to market and in addition wants to simplify the way you deliver hosted services?

Ensim aims to help you with some of your most challenging problems and then some. Their Unify application enables service providers to centrally create, control and deliver hosted IP and application services.

We live in a world where you need to deploy a number of disparate best of breed solutions to customers. At the same time you need to be cognizant of the fact that the competition may be offering similar services. How do you differentiate further? You come up with unique bundles that serve your target audiences. You may have a bundle for teens, another for small business and another for real estate agents.

The company supplies service managers that are basically adapters to popular services such as the hosted offering from Broadsoft. Using an API that Broadsoft supplies Ensim is able to configure, deal with metering and check the health of the Broadsoft application.

As the name implies, Unify can deal with multiple applications as long as they run on IP. For example you can support Blackberry Server and IM if you like. As long as it runs on IP you are OK. By encapsulating other applications the program allows you to deal with a single interface to manage disparate services.

The ultimate goal of course is programmatic provisioning allowing a service to be configured all the way down to the welcome e-mail, without human intervention.

There is no bigger believer in enhanced services than me and a solution like Ensim's is a good idea as it allows service providers to focus on how to make money by providing unique bundling strategies without having to worry about service enablement. In my opinion, anything that can be done to speed service provider profitability is a good idea.

One final note is that Ensim's licensing structure allows you to pay them only when you sell your services meaning no risky cash outlays for a product that may not pay for itself. If I were a service provider I would be spending that initial savings on things like research to determine what added services customers will pay for.