Jed Ayres On ‘Big’ Desktop As-A-Service Opportunity For ControlUp Partners

Speaking at the Best of Breed 2023 conference, ControlUp’s CEO explains DaaS growth within his company and the market opportunity for MSPs and the channel.

ControlUp CEO Jed Ayres is bullish about the market opportunity for MSPs and partners around Desktop as-a-Service (DaaS) as the hybrid workforce era continues to evolve.

The San Jose, Calif.-based software management specialist for virtual and physical desktops is witnessing big growth in helping customers implement DaaS to boost and better secure the digital employee experience.

“We continue to see the biggest growth in terms of the 700 million enterprise PCs that are out in the market today,” said Ayres. “Just since 2021, we sold one million seats on the physical side and that part of the business is growing at about 50 percent year over year for us. It’s a big market opportunity and one that we hope the channel will participate in with us.”

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

Ayres’ comments came during an on-stage interview at the XChange Best of Breed 2023 conference in Atlanta, presented by the Channel Company, the parent company of CRN.

With ControlUp, customers can minimize time spent troubleshooting with context-rich data and reporting, proactively identify problems while automating solutions before tickets are submitted, and consolidate tools into a single web application.

“Because of COVID, we’ve enabled pretty much anybody to be able to work from home,” said Ayes. “Adding a tool like ControlUp really adds a layer of value on top of what most every organization is bracing for. We plan to make a big investment in the product around managed services, making the product more accessible to a multi-tenant MSP model.”

ControlUp aims to resolve desktop issues faster, prevent tickets, and reduce spending by providing its Digital Employee Experience Management Fabric to IT teams struggling with troubleshooting complex workspaces and support tickets.

Converged Technology Solutions (CTS) is a global solution provider who provides a slew of managed and professional services around security and data analytics in end-user computing. CTS, a large HP partner that sells laptops and desktops, said managing customer desktops is critical for cybersecurity and productivity.

“That conversation has been going on for quite some time around how do you continue to manage these endpoint devices as people work from anywhere or want to bring their own devices in? There’s always software upgrades going on, and those create hardpoints for our clients to manage those devices and keep them secure,” said Justin Hall, vice president, of global alliances for CTS.

“We’re absolutely having conversations around the endpoint as it continues to ingest data,” Hall said. “Our clients are thinking about more ways to secure and improve that.”

ControlUp’s CEO said his company is striving to make end user computing more safer and productive.

“Productivity is a big deal. So that’s where we excel is looking for issues, identify them before they actually occur, and then be able to remediate them—sometimes without ever having a trouble ticket open,” Ayres said. “We all know how much your trouble ticket costs, and how painful it is for an employee to stop and have to even open one.”

ControlUp: ‘We’re Building An AI Roadmap Into Our Product’

Ayres said there’s a big opportunity for his company to inject new AI capabilities into ControlUp’s offerings.

“With the amount of data that were collecting, there’s just this huge opportunity to actually apply AI to the customer data set,” said Ayres.

He said ControlUp, founded in 2014, has always had automation triggers to fix issues, but plans to build AI into its portfolio in the near future.

“To be quite honest, we’re a little bit behind because we were kind of relying on this automation trigger concept. But yeah, you’ll see us catch up as we make some pretty big investments in [AI] and our teams,” said Ayres. “We’re building an AI roadmap into our product.”