businessinfomag.uk magazine 24 SOFTWARE A classic platform play Jed Ayres, CEO of ControlUp, tells James Goulding why the Digital Employee Experience expert is so well positioned to capitalise on growing demand for DEX solutions platform for the real-time monitoring 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 ControlUP does this proactively, sometimes before the user knows there is a problem, it can also save time, reduce tickets and free up resources for the IT team. 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 Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management is a growing area of IT that promises more contented employees, productivity gains and cost savings through the real-time monitoring of physical and virtual workspaces and the proactive remediation of morale-sapping aggravations such as connectivity and bandwidth issues, long log-on times and crashed applications. Gartner is forecasting the DEX tool market to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.3% from 2023 to 2027. Over the same period, it expects the proportion of IT organisations that have a DEX strategy, team and management tool to rise from 20% to 50%. As a leading DEX platform provider, ControlUp is already benefiting from this impetus. Last year, it experienced high doubledigit growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and a 40% rise in the total number of endpoint seats under management to more than five million. This included a 30% increase in virtual desktop seats and a 120% rise in physical desktop seats under management. Jed Ayres, who was appointed CEO in August, aims to build on this momentum in 2024 with new offices, new personnel and increased investment in its go-tomarket strategy. ControlUp recently opened a new headquarters in San Francisco, a new centre of excellence in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and a new sales office in New York City. Later this year, it plans to open an office in London. This follows the announcement at the end of last year of a distribution agreement with DataSolutions, a Climb company that will help it to expand its partner network in the UK and Ireland and give resellers and MSPs on this side of the Atlantic the opportunity to compete in the emerging DEX market with a leading for a DEX solution that empowers IT teams to support users better has spread to other environments propelled by 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 co-founders Yoni Avital and Asaf Ganot to 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 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 we'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
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