01732 759725 32 DIGITAL EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE 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, adds 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 3540% 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 at the lowest levels 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 ...continued
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