26 01732 759725 “The platform has been a unique path to success for us. I would say it’s been critical in these large enterprises that we just take that whole set of IP and make it really easy to consume on a three-year single SKU model that’s very aggressively priced. And they’re choosing that to cover their whole estate,” says Ayres. AI acquisition In January, ControlUp took a big step forward in its AEM strategy with the acquisition of Unipath, an AI-powered security automation and SOAR platform, with the intention of using its agentic AI framework for end user compute. The addition of Unipath moves ControlUp beyond rules-based and script-based automation, which is how it has enabled support teams to remediate issues and vulnerabilities in the past, to a self-learning remediation model that has the potential to autonomously diagnose and remediate issues without IT teams having to design, script or maintain automation workflows. At ControlUp’s EMEA Beyond Experience channel partner conference at Wembley Stadium earlier this year Ayres described this capability as ‘foundational to where we’re taking the business’. “In the traditional IT model, you have an endpoint that emits a signal, you have a dashboard, and you have humans involved from thereon in. They investigate, they decide what to do, they remediate, and the end user has to confirm that it’s working. This is the way we’ve been doing it for the last 40 years, creating a lock-in between more tools, more tickets, more troubleshooting. Where we’re going is an opportunity to break the chains of this model entirely with one that is able to observe, to act autonomously, to verify and to learn and build on itself,” he said. “I think every manual fix today is going to be something that we can automate out. This is going to free up IT from doing the same repetitive fixes over and over again. In three years, I would suggest, doing it the way we’re doing it today will be a way automated actions to remediate problems. ControlUp currently runs 50 million automated actions every week – a 319% increase since the beginning of the year – and Ayres is confident this will rise to 100 million in the next 12 months. This would be a step change for ControlUp which started out in 2014 with the release of a software download giving real-time monitoring and visibility of VDI estates and over the next decade grew into a company with about $60 million ARR derived almost entirely from that one SKU. In 2020, ControlUp extended its monitoring to physical endpoints, followed, in 2025, by user monitoring for SaaS and web applications, giving IT teams the information needed to optimise the Digital Employee Experience (DEX). In 2024, it introduced a cybersecurity and compliance solution, ControlUp for Compliance (originally called Secure DX), for detecting and remediating endpoint vulnerabilities and weak security configurations. “When I got here two and a half years ago, 85% of our revenue was paid to one product. It’s now down to 65% for VDI. The desktop business is 29% and growing in high double-digits. Our security offering, also from a dead start about a year and a half ago, is also growing in triple digits,” explains Ayres. Another big development over the last two years has been the company’s evolution into an enterprise platform with the launch in January 2025 of ControlUp One giving enterprise customers access to ControlUp’s diversified portfolio through a unified platform and single subscription. Designed for organisations with at least 5,000 seats, these $250,000 to $300,000 contracts now make up around 21% of ControlUp’s business. Almost all of the 100-plus ControlUp One contracts sold to date have a technical resource manager attached who can help customers take full advantage of the platform including its developing agentic AI capabilities. This has allowed ControlUp to build a $3 million services business that is growing at 100% year-on-year. In March, digital employee experience (DEX) company ControlUp joined an exclusive group of software companies by reaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), driven by the successful expansion of its product offering and the launch of its ControlUp One enterprise subscription. CEO Jed Ayres is now aiming to grow ARR to $200m within three years, compared to the 11 years it took the company to reach $100m. Propelling this growth will be ControlUp’s move from a focus on VDI and DEX to autonomous endpoint management (AEM) powered by AI. Ayres expects 2026 to be a pivotal year for the company as it introduces more AI into its platform and more customers use ControlUp has made a name for itself in DEX but now has much broader ambitions, reports James Goulding From better troubleshooting to no troubleshooting ENDPOINT MANAGEMENT Jed Ayes
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