28 01732 759725 ENDPOINT MANAGEMENT tickets. That’s core to how we think about acquisitions too. I love it when I see two or three tools being consolidated. We’re trying to find things that fit that narrative so that eventually a ControlUp One platform win will see five or six tools taken out.” A stronger channel Another part of Ayres’ plans for building a company with exceptional AI-driven innovation and a high growth rate and profitability is to build a stronger channel and a bigger ecosystem. “One thing that came out of Beyond Experience that really excites me is a re-energised channel. Almost every metric we have for measuring the activity of our channel, like deal registrations, is up triple digits this year. From a channel perspective, we’re just getting a lot of momentum. “The other thing that’s happening is we’re really starting to make progress with the global system integrators, which, going back to that origin story of being product-led, is an area we never made a big investment in until recently. We have people on the ground in India now. We’re building our channel competency with TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), HCL Tech and Tech Mahindra. They are all set up to transact with us. It’s a little bit of a virtuous circle, because as we’ve been winning more and more of these large enterprise customers, they immediately turn around and do RFPs and expect the large system integrator houses to be able to utilise ControlUp as a foundational tool. This has created a virtuous circle, where we have them coming to our doorstep and we’re going to their door. When you look at the largest players in DEX, half of their revenues are coming from these large system integrators. It’s a huge lever for us. We have 11 RFPs right now, where the GSIs are leading with ControlUp for a DEX opportunity. That just speaks to the opportunity that we’ve been missing.” As well as developing relationships with GSIs, ControlUp has launched a new multi‑tenant platform and partner programme specifically for MSPs, ControlUp for MSPs, as Ayres advances his mission to boost sales through the channel. “When I started, we were at 50% through the channel. In the last two and a half years, we’ve got to 72%. When I was at IGEL (Ayres’ previous employer), we were 100% channel and that’s where I’d like ControlUp to get to.” For example, the support team could ask it to show how many applications crashed last week compared to the week before and it will go away, interrogate the data and come back with the answer that last week you had 115 crashes and in the previous week you had 54. It will list what those applications were and whether any of them were major. If asked, it can investigate why the crashes are happening, how often and on what machines and recommend how to fix it. AI is also powering a new selfservice feature, Controlup Connect, that for the first time links an employee to ControlUp so that they can fix certain issues themselves. M&A strategy In support of its evolution, ControlUp will continue to make acquisitions. And not just for IP. For the first time, it will also be looking to gain customers with ARR attached to them. “One of the things I will say about the M&A strategy we’re building is that we know who our constituent is and who our buyer is. It’s really this end user compute IT guy who wants fewer tools, less troubleshooting, less trouble Even today, if you reverse engineer thousands of trouble tickets, you see that for these guys it’s Groundhog Day; they solve the same problems over and over and over again. Over the last 30 or 40 years, the cost and complexity of managing Windows endpoints specifically hasn’t got that much better. We have more tools that are collecting more data, creating more noise – not always signals – and the ratios of people that are managing these end points really hasn’t improved that much. This is the quandary for many of these enormous endpoint management companies and this is why we’re staking our claim that DEX is the keyhole into autonomous endpoint management. That is the category we want to lead. The addressable market is enormous.” In the meantime, ControlUp is helping users be more efficient with the launch of ControlUp AI Assistant, the first feature powered by its Pulse AI agentic intelligence layer. An LLM chatbot for the data inside ControlUp that can also connect to AI MCP services and interrogate other systems, AI Assistant allows users to ask AI, in plain English, for information and assistance. ...continued
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