Citrix has announced the acquisition of EMS-Cortex, a New Zealand-based software technology company that specializes in cloud services provisioning and management.

Their product, Cortex Cloud Control Panel, enables service providers and their customers to easily set up, provision and maintain a wide variety of hosted services from a single, easy-to-use, self-service interface. Using the Cortex Cloud Control Panel, a customer can log in to a web site and with a few clicks, manage user accounts, assign desktops, and add or change the applications or services they receive.  Services are automatically provisioned, and moments later the user can log in and begin working. They can even check usage reports to be sure they are on track.

On the service provider side, administrators can instantly create new tenant accounts and delegate management rights to specific users. It saves on help desk and operational costs, because tenants self-service their accounts. Leading app hosting providers around the world have already deployed Cortex Cloud Control Panel.  These service providers experience increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, and an ability to scale the business while controlling operational costs.

In addition to providing integration with Citrix XenApp, the Cortex Cloud Control Panel is renowned for its extensive support of the full suite of Microsoft hosting solutions (Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, OCS, Web Hosting, SQL Server, DNS, RDS, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Virtual Server Hosting with Hyper-V). Combined with Citrix technology, now any subscriber can manage and use their applications from any device at any location. For the near term, the Cortex Cloud Control Panel will continue to be offered as a standalone product on a subscription basis, as it was prior to the acquisition.