Ensim Corporation, the dominant hosting automation provider, and BillMax Billing Systems, have announced an alliance to enable service providers to rapidly integrate billing into their hosting automation infrastructures. Ensim's addition of a billing and customer management module to its ServerXchangeT platform will allow hosting providers worldwide to gain greater operational efficiencies and improve customer service.

Ensim's ServerXchange automates and manages servers, applications and customers from a single, unified interface. Hosting providers use ServerXchange to build a scalable hosting infrastructure that optimises the reseller channel and the creation and expansion of plans and service offerings. With the new enhancements, the BillMax billing and customer management applications will be fully integrated into ServerXchange. The alliance with BillMax, a division of The iSpark Group, Inc., also addresses technology integration and global joint sales and marketing.

BillMax-enhanced ServerXchange is currently available through Ensim's Professional Services Organization "We continue to expand our competitive lead by listening to the growing roster of customers who see first-hand that hosting automation increases revenue, reduces costs and effectively contributes to the growth of their business," said Rosen Sharma, president and CEO of Ensim. "Our work with BillMax contributes to the ongoing enrichment of our products, sales and marketing to help ensure that more and more hosting providers deploy ServerXchange in their data centres."

Through the integration of BillMax, ServerXchange will gain powerful features such as:

· Service definition, pricing and work-order generation.
Order administration and tracking.
· Pricing support for defined plans and add-ons.
· Account activation, suspension and account status tracking.
· Service usage tracking and billing.
· Generation and distribution of billing statements and financial reports.
· Creation and tracking of customer trouble tickets.

The new BillMax-based combined product will retain the look and feel of ServerXchange.