Last August, Jed Ayres (Pictured Above) was appointed CEO of Digital Employee Experience leader ControlUp to supercharge its growth and extend its reach through the channel. Here, he tells Technology Reseller why this is the opportunity of a lifetime and why he wished he had had a product like ControlUp when he was a technology reseller
At the end of last year, ControlUp, the industry leader in Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management, appointed DataSolutions, a Climb company and specialist distributor of IT solutions, as the primary distributor of its solutions in the UK and Ireland.
Part of a new channel-focused go-to-market strategy being implemented by recently appointed CEO Jed Ayres, this partnership will give resellers and MSPs on this side of the Atlantic the opportunity to compete in the emerging DEX market with a leading platform for the real-time monitoring of physical and virtual workspaces and the remediation of morale-sapping aggravations such as connectivity and bandwidth issues, long log-on times and crashed applications.
ControlUp monitors every aspect of IT infrastructure, including devices, networks, applications, unified communications, Citrix, VMWare and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS), helping IT teams to identify and remediate technical issues that might otherwise leave users frustrated and unable to work effectively.
Because it does this proactively, even before the user knows there is a problem, it can also save time, reduce tickets and free up resources for the IT team.
Last August, Ayres, previously CEO of IGEL, provider of a managed endpoint OS for secured access to any digital workspace, was brought on-board to apply his marketing expertise to the business side of operations, leaving co-founders Yoni Avital and Asaf Ganot to focus on product development and innovation.
Born in virtualisation
ControlUp’s roots lie in the world of virtualisation.
It was originally set up by Smart-X, a company created in 2008 from the merger of two of Israel’s largest Citrix and VDI specialists, to commercialise tools it had created to diagnose and resolve problems in Citrix environments.
In 2014, the company founders realised that these tools could be productised and divided the company into two: Smart-X, to provide professional services and to resell the company’s software products; and ControlUp to focus on software development.
Ayres says that virtualisation was the natural seedbed for DEX solutions as employee experience has always been a priority in a world where users have less ability to control things locally.
“A physical Windows device was generally understood to be a localised entity. Yes, you were connecting it to a network and putting some agents and security on it, but most of the apps would be installed locally. Virtualisation involves a much more fragile set of architectures, and if the user experience isn’t right people will quickly blame Citrix or VMware. For that reason, the employee experience has always been a top priority in that world.”
In the last three years, the need for a DEX solution that empowers IT teams to support users better by monitoring devices, networks, tools and applications and by proactively highlighting and remediating issues has spread to other environments.
This trend has been propelled the rise of remote/home working, video-based collaboration and the expectation of being able to work anywhere, all of which have contributed to more complex workspaces with multiple potential points of failure.
To meet this demand, in 2021, ControlUp expanded its capabilities with the acquisition of Avacee, which monitors and remediates problems in physical environments, effectively adding 700 million enterprise PCs to its initial addressable market of 100 million VDI sessions.
Big attraction
For Ayres, ControlUp’s diversification into the PC side of the market was a big reason for joining the company. That and the fact that it has two world class investors (JVP and K1), money in the bank and, in his opinion, the best product in the DEX space.
“Having me come in to focus on the go-to-market part of the business allows Yoni and Asaf to really focus on building out this platform that brings together the best VDI solution, the physical monitoring product we bought and a number of other point solutions that ControlUp has built over the years, including a synthetic testing solution that lets you ensure everything is going to perform as expected before deployment and subsequently proactively monitor performance.
“The amount of innovation coming out of these internal labs and the roadmap they have is pretty incredible, and we’re sitting on a very healthy balance sheet. So, in addition to the work that they’re doing organically to enhance the roadmap around security and web analytics, we’re in a position to acquire stuff as well.”
For a marketer there is the added attraction of being able to define a space that is still somewhat amorphous.
“It can be hard to put a finger on what ControlUp can do, because its benefits manifest themselves in so many ways. Sometimes it’s about login. For example, we had a guy at the VMware Explore event who came in from Dick’s Sporting Goods, who was complaining that the average login time at stores was 224 seconds. We got it down to less than 25 seconds. What is the cumulative effect of that saving across every employee, every store, every day?
“DEX is a super interesting space because while it has a few people competing in it, nobody has yet really defined it, said what it stands for and owned it. For me as a marketer, that is a dream come true. I get to join a company that I think has the best technology in this space, the best investors, some of the smartest people I’ve ever met, a couple of hundred really charged-up developers and a very clean balance sheet. The table is set for us to own the category, to define the category and to go on a journey that for a CEO is a once in a lifetime-type opportunity.”
Three second rule
Ayres believes ControlUp has an opportunity to make this space its own due to certain competitive advantages, notably the speed at which it does three things needed to optimise the user experience – collecting data, presenting insights and remediating problems.
“Part of why we’ve grown so quickly is that we look at people’s environment every three seconds, whereas a lot of legacy companies are snapping it every five minutes. Three seconds is essentially real-time. That’s a game-changer for IT. They go from patching together a picture of what’s going on from guesswork and a lot of point solutions to having a cockpit of rich data that’s presented in a way that allows IT to drill down on someone and see exactly what device they are using, what sessions they are using, what versions of applications they are using – a thousand different insights. And then you can remediate problems proactively.”
Because ControlUp also monitors the entire remote experience, IT can see whether performance issues experienced by a home worker on a conference call are due to a problem with the ISP, the network or the device, or because the user is running multiple sessions in a browser and is consuming too much CPU.
“We can see down to the user’s hardware components – Has their device got enough RAM? Is it in warranty? Can it run Windows 11? – and all the way up to how an application is running and how long it takes them to log into that application? Everything that affects that employee’s experience we have the capacity to measure and analyse and remediate if it goes beyond a certain tolerance level.”
Once IT has identified a problem, ideally before the user has even noticed it, they can trigger a script to fix it. In the future, says Ayres, common problems are likely to be remediated automatically through AI.
“It’s very early stages, but a lot of work is already being done around the language models and the data that we collect. We collect data on about 5 million seats, so you can imagine the amount of data available to us. We also have data on what’s been causing issues and how those issues were resolved, so if we see the same thing happening again and again, we can automate it out. Today, these triggers are built by professional services teams that spot trend lines, but with AI you could engineer it so the IT guy doesn’t even have to write that script.”
Channel relationships
In the meantime, as Ayres seeks to boost year-on-year growth to the 35-40% mark, he is looking forward to leveraging his existing relationships with Citrix, VMware, Microsoft and their channel partners and introducing ControlUp to millions more of the VDI and DaaS (desktop-as-service) installed base.
“ControlUp’s growth has largely been a viral, bottom-up, product-led motion from the day back in 2014 when a Citrix SE blogged about it being a game-changer for driving great performance. That same day hundreds of people downloaded it. So, from the start, the product has been sold directly to the end user compute sponsor inside organisations, the guy who’s renting or managing the Citrix environment or the VMware environment. That’s taken the company to a pretty amazing place, in terms of the amount of revenue that we have.
“My opportunity is to introduce this to the Citrix resellers, the VMware resellers who I have long histories with and who are responsible for a lot of the 100 million seats of Citrix and VMware that are out there. Today, we only have 4 million seats, about 4% of that market, and as those 100 million seats get recalibrated in a changing environment, with Citrix going private and VMware acquired by Broadcom and Microsoft desktop-as-a-service, the channel’s going to have a big role to play.”
One of Ayres first actions as CEO has been to upgrade ControlUp’s partner programme to make it attractive and lucrative for resellers both on the PC side and the VDI/DaaS side to introduce ControlUp to their customers.
ControlUp currently has relationships with just a few partners, but Ayres is confident that adoption by resellers and MSPs will grow with the help of partners like DataSolutions in the UK.
“One of the things I love about ControlUp is that the sales cycles here are incredibly quick. And that’s also interesting for a reseller. After doing discovery to identify the pain points in a customer’s employee experience, you can put our agent on a few 100 devices and suddenly they see the root cause. Speaking as somebody who spent 20 years as a reseller, this is the type of product you look for: it’s a very fast sales cycle, it’s highly differentiated, it has a juicy roadmap and it has a big addressable market.”
Greater channel reach is just one element of Ayres’ go-to-market strategy. He will also be exploring opportunities to build alliances with hardware vendors, for example to enable the ControlUp agent to be embedded within computers before they leave the factory, and with software vendors like ServiceNow that might want to integrate ControlUp so that the insights it generates are available from within their application.
In addition, one of his first actions as CEO was to strengthen ControlUp’s enterprise sales capabilities by hiring Tom Holland, who in his 18 years at Citrix built the company’s enterprise selling motion, as the company’s first CRO, with responsibility for building sales teams and channel programmes.
Future developments
In the meantime, Ayres says that ControlUp will continue to strengthen its DEX platform with new capabilities.
“Our North star, as we get a really strong footing in the virtual cloud PC world that we come from and the physical world, is to keep adding new capabilities to the platform as we go.
“I see adding security as the next logical step, given the amazing amount of data we have on applications and devices that we can provide back to an organisation. One of the real gifts of the development team is knowing how to visualise an insane amount of data in real time. In this case, that could be compliance data around the state of the hardware and the applications. That’s job number one in terms of getting security right: what versions are you on? And are they in compliance? I think we can be a really good partner in the security space.
“Then, as the world continues to move to a more web-delivered, browser-delivered model, we’re looking to add technology that will really illuminate web-delivered applications and the analytics that you need to ensure the web experience also is optimised. We’re going to see more companies where 85% of what they do is through the browser. So we’re investing a lot there.
“It’s all about being the leading DEX platform. That’s the starting point and then we just bring in additional components. In that sense, ControlUp is a classic platform play. With the balance sheet we have, the war chest we have and the way the company is set up to add value to our customers, everything just snowballs from there.”
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