Jed
Ayres

The Quiet Fix

At Dick's Sporting Goods, employees used to wait 224 seconds for their computers to log in every morning. Three minutes and forty-four seconds, every day, at every register, in every store. Then ControlUp touched the infrastructure. Login time dropped to under 25 seconds. Nobody sent a press release. The computers just worked.

This is Jed Ayres's world - enterprise IT that remediates itself, invisibly, before the help desk phone rings. He joined ControlUp as CEO in August 2023, the third outsider CEO to be brought into a category-defining company in the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) market. The co-founder, Asaf Ganot, stepped back to Executive Chairman. Ayres stepped in to scale.

What he found was a platform already used by more than one-third of the Fortune 100. What he built in 30 months was a unicorn: $100M+ in annual recurring revenue and a valuation north of $1 billion, announced April 2026. The company's ControlUp ONE platform, launched January 2025, reached 1 million endpoints - out of 6 million total - within months, growing 37% since debut.

Four Companies, Four Acquisitions - Then a Different Game

The Jed Ayres pattern, for anyone who has watched him closely across two decades in enterprise IT, goes like this: join a company mid-transformation, define the pivot, build the story, exit to an acquirer. Repeat.

At MTM Technologies, a national IT solutions provider, he spent six years as SVP of Partner Management and Marketing. At MCPc, a $300M+ solutions provider headquartered in Cleveland, he was CMO - the company later sold to Logicalis. At AppSense, he took over worldwide marketing, rebranded the company, drove growth, and watched it get absorbed into Ivanti via Thoma Bravo. Then came IGEL.

The 4 AM Call That Changed Everything

He was driving on Highway 280 when Simon Richards called. It was 4 in the morning. IGEL Technology - a German company known for thin-client hardware, the kind of category most American enterprise software people would politely ignore - wanted to talk. Ayres took the call, agreed to dinner with IGEL founder Heiko Gloge, and got an education.

Two trusted mentors from his previous company specifically staged a dinner intervention to talk him out of it. A hardware company? In 2014? With thin clients? He listened. Then he ignored them.

At that first dinner, Heiko Gloge pulled out a sheet of paper. On it: 40 typewritten marketing questions. The dinner extended by an hour. Ayres later said that moment told him everything he needed to know about Gloge - the founder was genuinely curious, genuinely willing to empower, and genuinely invested in Ayres's thinking. He joined as CMO. He eventually became Global CEO.

What followed was one of the cleaner hardware-to-software pivots in the end-user computing industry. IGEL became a software-first platform for managing cloud workspaces and virtual desktops. The transformation made the company acquisition-ready. TA Associates bought it. Ayres moved on.

ControlUp and the Autonomous IT Bet

When Ayres joined ControlUp, the company was already a recognized leader in Digital Employee Experience - a category that monitors and optimizes how employees interact with their digital tools. DEX was the frame. But Ayres, watching AI accelerate across the industry in 2023 and 2024, started repositioning the story around something more ambitious: Autonomous Endpoint Management (AEM).

The logic is straightforward in concept, complicated in execution. DEX tools see problems. AEM tools fix them - automatically, in real time, without a human in the loop. ControlUp's platform now executes over 14 million automated remediations per week. The company acquired Unipath to deepen its self-learning automation capabilities and push further into agentic AI.

The early results are measurable. Partner-driven deal registrations grew 133% year-over-year. ControlUp was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Employee Experience Management Tools - and received Customers' Choice recognition with 4.8 out of 5 stars in Gartner Peer Insights. The ControlUp ONE platform - the company's unified product designed to converge DEX and IT operations - launched in January 2025 and is expanding at 37% since debut.

How He Leads

Ayres grew up professionally in marketing - CMO roles at multiple companies before his first CEO title. He talks about this transition deliberately. "You are no longer serving as a domain expert," he has said. The CMO sees market position and narrative. The CEO has to have functional fluency across everything: product, finance, sales, culture. The transition requires, in his framing, becoming a generalist who can see around corners rather than a specialist who owns a room.

His three-point leadership philosophy surfaces consistently in interviews: visionary thinking (the ability to see a future and build toward it), genuine people-centeredness (respect and voice for every person in the organization), and humility (keeping the ego in check, staying grateful for the opportunity). He calls this a "servant's heart" approach - a phrase that sounds soft until you notice the operational results.

He also cites Heiko Gloge's phrase from IGEL kickoffs - "be focused" - as something he only truly understood after wearing every hat in a company. Focus, in the executive sense, is not about working harder. It is about choosing what not to do.

On Sustainability

One thread that runs through Ayres's public thinking, less prominent than the AEM story but present since his IGEL days: digital workplaces as a climate tool. Remote work infrastructure, virtualized desktops, and managed endpoints reduce commutes and office footprints at scale. He views this not as a marketing angle but as a genuine belief - that the infrastructure he builds has an environmental argument attached to it.