Transcript
Hi Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data. And we're here today talking about something that everybody cares about, which is their, you know, experience at the desktop or experience at the keyboard, the experience they get out of their IT applications, their corporate applications, their infrastructure, their network. We all care about that because it's what we do all day long. Uh, I've got control up here to talk about how it can do a better job of keeping your experience levels high. Just hang on for a second. Hi, Joel, welcome to the show. Thanks, Mike. I'm excited to be here today. Uh, so you're a VP of product marketing and a bunch of other stuff at Control Up. Um, control up does, uh, a few things we're going to talk about here in terms of, uh, you know, nominally desktop performance monitoring, but it really expands outwards from there into this idea of user experience. And we'll get into some of those terms in a second. But I just want to know, first, how did you get into this area of of monitoring? I had a career in performance and capacity planning before doing this. Uh, how did how did you find this area? Yeah, absolutely. So, um, so the majority of my career, I worked at a company called Citrix. Uh, some of your viewers might be familiar with it. And Citrix always, of course, has been on the end user side, uh, end user computing. And basically coming from that market, I think that, you know, and being an end user myself in a way, uh, making sure that people have a great experience when they're working with technology. And that started at Citrix with virtual desktops. Um, has always been kind of like, near to my heart. Uh, and, you know, when I changed to another company, in this case, controller, it was, for me a very natural kind of like, you know, transition, uh, when it comes to, you know, thinking and helping people with their end user experience. Yeah. Let's talk about desktops for a second. So we Covid obviously was a thing. People started working more remotely and and in a more distributed fashion. Uh, did you see, uh, sort of a big increase in the demand for that kind of computing, that desktop computing versus people working on premise and did that, you know, was that a big a motivation for control up here? So it was actually interesting because initially everybody was kind of like panicking and like, how do we get people to work remotely at all? Right. So their initial thought was, let's just get the infrastructure in place. And then what we saw was like later on, uh, during Covid still, was that all of a sudden, okay, so now we need to understand, you know, are things working? Uh, we had a lot of customers say, oh, we're getting people that call us and they say, well, there's an issue, it's slow or whatever, and we have no idea if it's us or if it's maybe them, uh, you know, it could be, you know, working from home. Uh, not alone, probably. Right. The whole family is there. Uh, and, you know, our customers were struggling with kind of like finding out where certain experience issues were coming from. So this is where we build some technologies and kind of like solutions where, uh, we could immediately impact, you know, the IT teams and help them kind of like resolving a lot of these challenges that came, uh, throughout the pandemic. And it's, you know, for people who've been watching this show for a while, we know that when you're working from home, there's a long chain of technologies there, and you have to be able to quickly find out where the the slow point is or the pain point is, uh, if you're on the IT side of the house and it can get pretty complex. Um, I just also, I wanted to ask you two something. When we're looking at looking at some of the some things control up does is you talk about xla's, uh, you know, my I'm an SLA guy going way back, right? Uh, what are we talking about when we talk about Xla's? Is that is that something, uh, that that, uh, has a strong definition to it? Yeah. So, um, so when we talk about experience level agreements. So I think when we talk about Xla's, there's some differences from SLAs. Right? An XLA will include the metrics that you capture around, you know, people using desktops, people using physical virtual desktops, physical, uh, applications that are running on it. Uh, so there's still this, uh, quantitative element in an XLA, but now you bring in the user sentiment, uh, so understanding the user sentiment through user surveys and things like that becomes an element. Now there's immediately a little kind of like footnote there, because on Xla's, when people are xla's, they think penalties if you don't meet it, that's not something you can do in an XLA, because the moment you bring in somebody's opinion, right, nobody's going to sign off on, you know, uh, if we don't meet it like 99%, then we're going to pay you this. But the idea of looking further than just the metrics is an important part of understanding the experience people have with technology. Yeah, we always talked about the fact that, you know, you could take a transaction that's running in milliseconds and slow it down by 100 times, and most people wouldn't notice. Uh, but, you know, if you somehow magically wandered above, you know, the, the keystroke showing up on the screen, more than 7/10 of a second. Then people went in for coffee, right. Like, and it would add up. And so there's these psychological factors that definitely play into when perceptions change on performance. Right. And when you're talking about you people. Um, so what now? So control up. You label this a digital employee experience platform. You call it Dex a lot. Um, why? Why are we talking about digital employees? I probably have that wrong. Right? It's like the it's digital. The it's a digital platform. But what how does that how does that work. Well, it's it's it's. The digital aspect is, you know, and you don't really have to call it out anymore. Right. Because I think we're all working digitally. Right. But it's basically all the aspects. So if I'm looking here around me, right, I have my desktop, I have my keyboard, I have my, my, my screens. Right. That is a part of it. But it's what's running on there. Right. And that is a mix of local applications, web applications. Uh, how we're recording this through unified communications tools. So and you know, the word employee, we're not stuck with that. Right. It is at the end of the day, an end user that could be an employee. And in most of the cases it is, but it could be an external consultant that works for your company. But basically everybody that consumes technology in a way, in the workplace is where we're trying to understand the experience, monitor it through agents. We bring in data, we enrich that with data that we get through certain platforms. For example, the APIs from a unified communications vendor and really try to bubble up, you know, any issues that the user might have that will prevent them from working. All right. So you're stitching together data from a number of sources to try to present a unified view of, of experience that I guess it people really need to do their job better and faster. Who who in the company uses control up or benefits from from control up other than the IT person and that end user. So obviously on a day to day basis when it comes to, uh, fixing issues or answering questions, it's really it's time and it's productivity that can be improved. That goes from, you know, being able to more quickly close an end user ticket or ideally even prevent it and use automation to, you know, resolve issues even before they become a real issue. But I think there's more and more interest also coming from other parts of the organization to understand usage of applications. There could be a cost factor, right? Uh, you know, hey, we're acquiring a thousand licenses for application X. Are people actually using it a thousand times? Right. Are there thousand users of it? Uh, but even with newer, newer things, uh, I'm not saying it's new, but, you know, from a company point of view, questions about sustainability are becoming more and more important, right? The reporting requirements that are coming from the government and things like that, uh, you know, and digital employee experience tools will also, because we have all these metrics and all the data that we collect give insights in other aspects than just a user using an application. Right. And I think, you know, it seems to me that there's some other tie ins to just from my past experience and performance, that there are people who are developing the apps that are going to care. There are people who are trying to secure the enterprise and secure the applications. Users are going to care about this there. There are people in the boardroom who are, as you said, concerned with licensing. But, you know, also maybe the overall cost of how many tools is it buying this year? I need to reduce, I need to reduce that it spend in some way. Uh, again, cost uh, so that there's lots of lots of people who could do with a consistent and complete view of what's going on between it and the users. Yeah. And I think you. Bring up an important point as far as a number of tools that IT teams use. And, you know, sometimes it has just grown historically through, uh, siloed organizations where everybody bought their own tools. I think the idea of simplification of it, by reducing the number of ways how we solve problems and reduce the number of ways, uh, how we find answers, um, you know, can be not only a good practice to reduce cost in licensing of these tools, but also, you know, the, the on ramping of new people coming into it that are really focused on helping their end users. Right? I don't want to have them to learn 40 different tools. Uh, I think there's one other aspect, because you brought up, uh, the pandemic earlier, I think, you know, the way we work, you know, with hybrid work definitely here to stay. I think a lot of the tools that people have might not necessarily be suitable for an environment where people don't work 9 to 5 in an office, right? That that extended visibility into the home network. A lot of the tools from back in the day are just not suitable. Index tools are really focused on providing that end to end visibility from one, uh, one interface. Right. It's really I mean, and I think I've heard this before, uh, when we were talking earlier that it's all about the. End user productivity at the end of everything. Right. It's and we know just given what we've been talking about that the end users are everywhere. Uh that that they're in coffee shops. They're, they're at home. They're they're traveling. They're in the office and sitting at different desks nowadays in a lot of offices. They're not always in the same place. Right. And they're and they're doing different things. So in a lot of ways, uh, you know, something's got a little simpler in that, hey, we've got cloud. We just go to the cloud and get our desktop. But a lot of things got more complex because we don't know where the end user is and what they're doing. So, um, that's interesting on there. Uh, can you just. And I guess for some people who are looking at this going like, wait, wait a minute, you've talked for now for ten minutes, you haven't really said what it is you do. Can you just give us like, just like a little pitch about like, okay, give me an example of the kind of problem you solve for, for it and, and how you solve that. So, so let me um, uh, pick one, you know, because I can probably list like 500 different use cases, but one that, that, that we have seen, uh, mostly because unified communications apps like, like Teams and Zoom, right, have become kind of like mission critical almost for most users. And, you know, I think that everybody who has been on a call has encountered some kind of issue. So what we do is and this is just one example, we can do this for any type of app. But let's just take this as an example. We can quickly for an IT admin that gets that call saying like, hey, my team's not working or an audio issue, something like that bubble up, right? Very easily in our interface. Hey, this is the root cause of this issue. And here is an action that you can run to resolve that issue. This could this is an example of teams or zoom. But this could also be hey, I'm running this web application or I'm running this local application or you know, I can't even log in, right. Or something is slow, right? If I'm on a Citrix, uh, or horizon connected session, something is slow. How do you know as an IT admin what the root cause is? And that is really where we're focused on bubbling up the root cause and then giving them the tools to remediate that issue so that the user can go back to being productive. All right, Joel, I know we just I know I have a career in performance. You guys have been doing this forever. I know if we start talking, we're going to be here all day about actual performance measurement, actual, you know, what's going on in application transactions, users, workloads, workflow, the whole, the whole shebang. But you have it there. If someone wants to learn more about it, maybe dive, dive into it themselves and take some next steps and look at control up and say, is this is going to be the right thing for us to to try to bring in here and simplify what we're looking at and helping us do digital experience, digital employee experience. Where would you point them at? What resources would you would you suggest they start with? Well, uh, there's of course a lot of information that you can find on our website at wwlp.com. Uh, but the best way to do it is go to our website and you will see a banner about a free 50 user VIP pack. So we have a free version of our product that people can use includes remote control and all those kind of things. If you want to test our full feature set, you will be able to start a trial for three weeks. Uh, you know, if you want our help, you can connect with us. If you want to do it yourself, you can do that. After the three weeks trial, you get to keep the 50 user VIP pack. So that is definitely the best place to start. All right, you heard it. Thank you for being here today, Joel, and making that offer. Thank you. Uh, and. Uh, you know, try it out. Uh, let me know. By the way, when you do that, what you find, because I'm curious to know is, is is this, uh, an area in which your company can benefit from doing better digital employee experience? Uh, management, monitoring, I guess. So how would you say that, Joe? Uh, I say digital employee experience management. Management. So we'll go with that. All right. We're working the expert. Thank you for being here again today. Uh, take care, folks, and, uh, come on back. We'll see you soon.
