ControlUp Co-Founder Asaf Ganot: Digital Employee Experience Market Is Set To Soar

“There are about 700 million desktops owned by enterprises,” said Ganot. “We are only starting to scratch the surface on that. We think the market is huge. It is growing very, very fast. We have found ourselves right on this wave and we hope to ride it well.”

(From L-R) ControlUp’s Asaf Ganot, Jed Ayres and Tom Holland

ControlUp Co-Founder and Executive Chairman Asaf Ganot, who just hired software transformation superstar Jed Ayres as CEO, said the digital employee experience (DEX) software market is set to soar.

“There are about 700 million desktops owned by enterprises,” said Ganot, who is handing the CEO reins to Ayres so he can focus on development of the ControlUp platform. “We are only starting to scratch the surface on that. We think the market is huge. It is growing very, very fast. We have found ourselves right on this wave and we hope to ride it well.”

ControlUp’s digital employee experience vision to provide a platform that monitors, optimizes and remediates any technology issues hindering employee productivity from “any desktop, any application and any location” is resonating with customers, said Ganot.

“We feel the marketplace now is ripe to be able to understand the big message here of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) with employees at the center,” he said. “What we are doing is monitoring everything that might affect the performance and the experience of the employee. We think that message is starting to resonate throughout the entire market.”

Ganot said he sees Ayres and new Chief Revenue Officer Tom Holland, a 16-year Citrix veteran who was most recently senior vice president of Americas sales and service, as setting up the company with the “horsepower and brainpower” to take the company to the next level.

What sparked you to bring Jed Ayres into the company as CEO?

What I feel is that in order to grow the company to the next level we need to build a lot of infrastructure with partners in the channel and with strategic alliances. We started doing that. We have a partnership with VMware and a really good partnership with Microsoft. We want to take it to the next level. We want to invest much more in the channel. We realize that there is only so much we can do by ourselves.

In order to really break through the roof and go to the next level, we need to invest much more in the channel and enterprise sales. That will give us the ability to go top down, not just bottom up. That will compliment the way we sell today. By going top down we can sell a holistic solution to the CIO.

I’ve been looking for somebody like Jed for a long time and the timing was right. I have known him for years. He is so well respected. We are super excited about the opportunity to have him on board.

Jed also brought on board Tom Holland. We think Tom is the right person to help us scale the sales to the next level. We are building a big company. We are starting to think about an IPO (initial public offering). We believe that in order to be well-positioned for a successful IPO the company (which was founded in Israel and maintains a robust product development team there) needs to be a U.S. company with U.S. headquarters. We need to invest much more in a U.S. presence.

I think Jed and I are going to be great partners. Jed will take control of the entire go-to-market function: marketing, sales, sales operations, customer support, etc. He will be in control of everything that has to do with money and I’m going to continue running everything that is related to the product and technology.

We’re doubling and tripling the horsepower and brainpower that we have. This is a super exciting time for ControlUp.

Does it take some pressure off you to have Jed on board as CEO?

I worry all the time. Now Jed is helping me worry. You need to always be alert.

What is the plan in terms of amping up the development effort to build and end-to-end digital experience platform?

We have already invested a lot of R&D effort in becoming a platform plugging in all kinds of additional modules or products into it. The way our R&D is structured is we have independent teams coming up with great innovation in a very short cycle and then we just plug it into our platform. So we keep on adding functionality that way.

Our vision for the (ControlUp) DEX (Digital Employee Experience) platform is pretty simple: any desktop, any application, and any location. It’s easy to say but very difficult to do.

Think about any desktop. It could be virtual, a cloud desktop, a physical desktop, a thin client, Windows, Mac, Linux. You have all those flavors and we have the technology to monitor, optimize and automate it.

Also any application. It could be a SaaS, a local application, a remote desktop application. Over the years we have invested a lot of R&D to monitor, optimize and automate all those types of technologies.

We feel the marketplace now is ripe to be able to understand the big message here of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) with employees at the center. What we are doing is monitoring everything that might affect the performance and the experience of the employee. We think that message is starting to resonate throughout the entire market.

One of strengths that we have is the ease of deployment of our technology. We have born in the cloud technology. It is super easy to set this software up in enterprises.. Nine out of ten enterprise customers are looking for a DEX solution. The midmarket is also starting to look for a DEX solution. We are best of breed for providing this digital employee experience software to the enterprise and midmarket. Those are the markets we are going after.

What does it mean that you were the first to develop the product as a Citrix reseller and services organization?

That was a long time ago.I wrote the first line of code. I think my developers have replaced all that code. They don’t like my code.

By the way I am the co-founder with (Control Up co-founder and COO) Yoni (Avital). Yoni and I had a professional services company. We used to be a Citrix Platinum reseller. We also resold VMware and Microsoft products.

We used to implement those Citrix projects at large enterprises and we would sell them SLAs as well. When they had problems they couldn’t deal with. They would call us. Basically ControlUp started as an internal tool to help us find a solution to optimize Citrix. That is how we started ControlUp. Our customers would see the tool and were like, “Wow that’s nice! We want to buy it!” That’s exactly how we started. We started selling it very opportunistically.

At some point in time we realized we had something big here. We pivoted the company and stopped all the professional services, took some investor money and we focused only on the tool.

How do you feel about the ability of partners to build ControlUp into a big company that can redefine the digital employee experience?

I think any value-added reseller or MSP should have some kind of digital employee experience practice. Customers today are looking for something that is very holistic with automation that provides them the tools to optimize the IT environment for employees. That is especially true today with people working in a hybrid model. It is becoming much more difficult to support employees. Those employees working from home have different ISPs, routers and solutions at their house and they face all kinds of problems. They don’t know what is causing those problems. It has become much more difficult to support organizations.

The smart MSPs, service providers and partners realize that they need some kind of a DEX platform that can take them into the new era of hybrid work. Those are the partners we are looking for. Naturally if they come from the VDI space, they probably already know us. We need to get to many more partners. That is one of the biggest tasks for Jed.

On average, how much productivity gains are enterprise customers seeing when they go all in with a DEX platform?

Measuring productivity is a tricky thing. When we try to measure productivity we try to stick to how many issues we detect and fix before a user complains and opens a ticket. We have millions of remediations running everyday. So it really depends on the type of customer and what kind of problem they are having and how much of those problems can be automated. With the large enterprises we see some meaningful numbers.

What has been the key to making this big investment to scale the company and take it to the next level?

To me, to keep doing the same thing that we did before was a dead end. We need to evolve. We need to continue to grow. We need more brainpower. We needed more smart people and more experience on the executive team. I am not a title guy. I don’t care about a title and the power. All I care about is the company and customers. At the end of the day the more the share price grows the more everyone benefits. This was my initiative. Nobody had to pay me anything to do this.

Are you surprised that more companies have not invested in a digital employee experience platform?

The world has changed and evolved. Before the pandemic, people would come to the office and everyone was working on corporate-grade equipment. You had the IT people there and if something broke they would fix it right away. Enterprises cared about uptime and whether the system uptime was 99.999 percent. This all changed with the pandemic. All of a sudden the work environment changed and became very, very dynamic.

Enterprises realize now they need to care about the employee experience. It’s great that your servers are up and running 99.99 percent of the time, but if something is running slow and the employee has a bad experience, what does it matter? It’s just a matter of maturity.

How much more demand is there for a digital experience platform in the post pandemic world?

So first of all it is not just about people working from home. You need to track, fix and optimize the experience also when you are in the office. Working in hybrid models has made things even more complex.

There are about 700 million desktops owned by enterprises. We are only starting to scratch the surface on that.We think the market is huge. It is growing very very fast. We have found ourselves right on this wave and we hope to ride it well.

How do you feel now that you have Jed and Tom on board and you are planning to make a big splash with the new company at VMworld?

I feel super good! I see that now I am able to focus more of my time on what I really have to do, which is product and technology.

How big could this company be as you move forward with your vision for the ControlUp digital experience software platform?

I think in a matter of three years, we will have a $2 billion valuation.