technologyreseller.co.uk 31 Last August, Jed Ayres 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 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, 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 goto-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 All hands on DEX DIGITAL EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE Continued... Jed Ayres
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=