ControlUp.
The watchman
of the digital workday.

01 / The SceneTuesday, 9:14 a.m. Somebody's laptop won't load Teams.

In a hospital outside Cleveland, a nurse taps the Citrix icon on her thin client and watches the spinning ring spin. In a brokerage in Frankfurt, a trader's Bloomberg tile freezes. In a contact center in Manila, three dozen agents simultaneously type "is it me or is everything slow?" into chat. Nobody calls IT yet. Nobody has to. A piece of software made in Ramat Hasharon has already noticed, scored the incident, and started fixing it.

That piece of software is ControlUp. It is, by any reasonable measure, the closest thing the IT operations world has to a watchman who never sleeps. It is also a company most office workers have never heard of - which is exactly the way the people who deploy it prefer it. Good DEX, the joke inside ControlUp goes, is the kind nobody mentions.

02 / The ProblemWhy nobody could see the workday.

For most of the 2010s, IT operations had a peculiar blindness. Network teams could see packets. Security teams could see threats. Application teams could see uptime. Nobody could see the actual experience of the person in the chair. CPU graphs lied. SLAs lied politely. Users wrote tickets that read, charmingly, like haiku: "slow today. yesterday fine. please help."

This blindness got worse, not better, when companies moved to virtual desktops. VDI was supposed to centralize control. Instead it added five new layers - hypervisor, broker, profile, network, endpoint - any of which could be the culprit, none of which talked to each other. Then came the great work-from-home migration of 2020, which scattered every endpoint to a kitchen table in a different ZIP code and dared IT to keep up.

The category that eventually got a name - Digital Employee Experience, or DEX - did not exist as Gartner taxonomy when ControlUp started shipping its first product. The company built the answer before the question had a Magic Quadrant.

03 / The BetTwo ex-Citrix engineers, one stubborn hunch.

ControlUp was started in 2008 by Asaf Ganot and Yoni Avital - both veterans of the end-user-computing world, both convinced that the right place to watch a system was from the user's seat, not the server's. Their hunch was not glamorous. It was: if you could correlate every layer of a virtual desktop, in real time, with what the user was actually feeling, you could move IT from firefighting to forecasting.

It took years for the rest of the industry to catch up. The product spent most of its first decade winning over Citrix and VMware administrators one shop at a time - the kind of grassroots, practitioner-led adoption that does not generate press releases but does generate renewals. By 2018, ControlUp had quietly crossed 1,000 customers. By 2020, it had acquired a small startup called Avacee to extend the same logic to physical laptops. The DEX category, finally, was catching up to the product.

04 / The ProductOne platform, several spies, no jargon.

Today ControlUp sells what it calls the ControlUp ONE Platform - a single license that pulls together products that used to be sold separately. The interesting ones to know are Edge DX (physical endpoints), ControlUp for Desktops (virtual sessions across Citrix, VMware Horizon, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Windows 365), Scoutbees (synthetic monitoring for SaaS apps), and Secure DX (autonomous vulnerability detection and remediation).

The product's defining trick is a per-user, per-session "experience score" - a number, refreshed in near-real-time, that tells IT how a workday is actually going. Behind that number is a thicket of telemetry: logon duration, network jitter, GPU pressure, app responsiveness, profile load time, the small humiliations of corporate computing rendered as a graph. When the number drops, ControlUp can also act - script-driven remediations, increasingly nudged by an in-product AI assistant out of ControlUp LABS.

05 / The ProofNumbers that mostly resist exaggeration.

The case for ControlUp is, refreshingly, made by figures rather than adjectives. There are 2,000-plus enterprise customers. There are 390-ish employees. There is $141M in cumulative funding. There is a Leaders quadrant. There is 30% year-on-year ARR growth in 2024, in a software market that spent most of the year apologizing.

The proof points get more interesting in the customer roster - hospitals that cannot afford a 4 a.m. EHR slowdown, banks running legacy fat clients over thin ones, manufacturers whose factory-floor workstations cannot take a coffee break. ControlUp is in all of them, mostly invisibly, which is precisely the assignment.

06 / The MissionAutonomous IT, without saying "autonomous" too loudly.

The current company line, courtesy of CEO Jed Ayres, is that experience is everything. Read past the executive-blog cadence and what it actually means is this: IT is finally being measured the way every other corporate function gets measured - by what it feels like to the person using it. ControlUp is betting that the next decade of enterprise IT is less about provisioning and more about sensing.

The longer-term bet, the one ControlUp LABS is making, is on autonomy. Not self-healing-as-a-buzzword, but the slow accumulation of small, boring, automatable fixes that, in aggregate, mean the help desk stops being a last resort and starts being a last line. The company calls this category Autonomous Endpoint Management. The rest of the industry has not quite caught up to the term yet, which, if history rhymes, is roughly where ControlUp likes to be.

07 / The StakesWhy this matters when nothing seems to be broken.

The thing about a watchman is that the better one is, the less interesting their workday looks. The nurse in Cleveland finishes her shift without raising a ticket. The trader in Frankfurt closes a position without losing a millisecond. The contact center in Manila hits its handle-time target. Nobody throws a parade for the software that made all of that boring. ControlUp is more than fine with that arrangement.

It is also why ControlUp's story matters beyond IT trade publications. Almost every white-collar workday now happens through a stack that nobody owns end-to-end - laptops from one vendor, identity from another, apps from a dozen, network from whoever the ISP is today. Somebody has to score that stack. Somebody has to act on the score. And the company that has been quietly doing it for sixteen years from a suburb of Tel Aviv just got the Magic Quadrant to prove it.

Back to Tuesday, 9:14 a.m. The Teams icon loads. The Bloomberg tile unfreezes. The Manila chat falls quiet again. Somewhere, a number that was 64 ticks back to 91. Nobody calls IT. That is the product. That is the company. That is, apparently, what a watchman is for.

08 / The ReceiptsWhere to read, watch, and verify.

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