digital-employee-experience
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Jim Gargan Has Spent 35 Years Turning Invisible Infrastructure Into a Story
From IBM server rooms to Oracle's cloud portfolio and Riverbed's push for practical AI, Jim Gargan has built a career around making complex technology legible - and tying it to the work people actually feel.
Firstup
Firstup is a San Francisco-based enterprise software company that builds an intelligent communication platform for connecting large organizations with their entire workforce - including the deskless and frontline majority. Formed in 2021 through the merger of SocialChorus and Dynamic Signal, Firstup uses AI-driven orchestration to deliver personalized, multi-channel messages to each employee across mobile apps, email, intranet and other channels, and measures the impact on outcomes like onboarding, retention, safety and productivity. Its platform is used by more than 500 enterprises - including roughly 40% of the Fortune 100 - reaching over 15 million employees worldwide.
Omnissa
Omnissa is an independent digital work platform company spun out of VMware's End-User Computing business after KKR's roughly $4 billion acquisition closed on July 1, 2024. Led by CEO Shankar Iyer, it builds the autonomous workspace: a unified platform spanning Workspace ONE (unified endpoint management), Omnissa Horizon (virtual desktops and apps / DaaS), and Omnissa Intelligence (analytics and digital employee experience), increasingly stitched together with trusted, AI-driven automation. The company serves more than 26,000 customers worldwide, including a majority of the Fortune 500, with about $1.5 billion in annual recurring revenue and roughly 4,000 employees.
ControlUp
ControlUp is a digital employee experience (DEX) and autonomous endpoint management platform that helps IT teams see, score, and fix problems on every desktop, virtual session, and SaaS app before users start filing tickets. Born in Israel in 2008 and headquartered in San Francisco, it serves more than 2,000 enterprise customers and was named a Leader in the inaugural 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for DEX Tools.
Asaf Ganot
Asaf Ganot is the co-founder of ControlUp, the company that pioneered the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management category. He spent a decade as CEO building ControlUp from an Israeli VDI monitoring tool into a global enterprise software leader backed by $141M in funding, before transitioning to Executive Chairman and CEO of ControlUp Labs in 2023 to focus on product vision and innovation.
Jed Ayres
Jed Ayres is the CEO of ControlUp, the $1B+ autonomous IT platform that executes over 14 million automated remediations per week across 6 million enterprise endpoints. A 20-year veteran of the end-user computing industry, Ayres has an unusual track record: he's joined companies in transformation, then handed them to acquirers. He turned IGEL from a hardware vendor into a software-first powerhouse that sold to TA Associates, scaled AppSense to an Thoma Bravo acquisition, and helped MCPc grow to $300M+ before it was acquired by Logicalis. At ControlUp since August 2023, he's steering the company's evolution from Digital Employee Experience (DEX) to what he calls a generational shift in IT - self-healing, AI-driven autonomous endpoint management. Off the clock, he completes Ironman triathlons and ultramarathons, which explains a lot about his leadership style.
Bill Schuh
Bill Schuh is the Chief Executive Officer of Firstup, the intelligent workforce communication platform built to reach, inform, and activate every employee from deskless frontline workers to corporate HQ. A Princeton-educated SaaS veteran, Schuh has spent three decades scaling enterprise software companies through IPOs and billion-dollar revenue milestones — from Sunrun to Medallia to Anaplan — before taking the helm at Firstup in June 2025 to lead the company's next chapter of growth.