What Brought Me to ControlUp

The technology business is all about change. In my lifetime I have seen enormous change as a result of technology. My two teenage children were shocked to learn that when I was in elementary school televisions had small screens and tubes, and many people had only 3 channels and no remote. There were no VCR’s yet, and certainly no one imagined DVD’s, Blue Ray discs or DVRs. Phones had cords, rotary dialers and were not portable. Computers were the size of a room (at least!). No one had Instagram, Twitter or Facebook but party lines were still around. I had never heard the internet even through the original ArpaNet was built around the time I was born, and no one I knew had ever heard of email or text messages.

Today, massive flat screens are common, there are more channels than I can count and Netflix streams over a billion hours of video content a week. Almost five billion people have a cell phone, and just over half of those people have a smartphone. The latest iPhones and Samsung phones have more computing power than was used in the entire Apollo space program. There are over 1.8 billion web sites today and 5 billion internet users.  The estimated number of emails sent per day is around 300 billion, while estimates of texts sent per day across all the various apps range as high as 8 trillion.

Change is inevitable AND relentless. Change leads to both challenges and opportunities. I have experienced a lot of change in my career as well.  I have gone from working from a nationwide service vendor then onto almost twelve years at Citrix as an System Engineer, Alliance manager, Evangelist and WW Sales Strategy leader. From there I worked with several different startups in monitoring and mobile solutions. I also spent almost five years at VMware, most recently leading EUC Partner Practice Recruitment in the Worldwide Partner Org.

My latest change is take on an exciting opportunity to join ControlUp.  At first glance, I assumed ControlUp was just another monitoring solution. I could not have been more wrong. ControlUp has embraced the rapid change in the tech business and is working to accelerate it.

One of my favorite quotes on change comes from Albert Einstein.

“The significant challenges we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

-Albert Einstein

In my mind, what Einstein is saying is when we face a difficult problem, we need to take a step back, begin to ask new questions and look at the challenges we face in a different light. That is what the leadership of ControlUp (Asaf, Yoni and Amir) have done at ControlUp.

There have been far too many IT infrastructure monitoring solutions to count. From the humble beginning of Task Manager and later PerfMon in Windows, monitoring and analytics solutions are now pervasive. The great majority strive for the same goal – to provide as much data and metrics as possible. The more effective solutions attempt to put that data in context and provide context into what the information gathered actually means.

The ControlUp team looked at the challenges faced by IT and how existing monitoring solutions attempted to face those problems. They reviewed what challenges and opportunities were created by those choices. Then they followed Einstein’s advice, and took their thinking to a different level.

Gathering metrics and information about the current state of the environment is the first step. What then? Looking at the data in both a real time and historical basis is required to put that data in context and gain insight. Even more valuable is the ability to compare that historical data to other organizations and understand if it is significantly different than the average. That is taking that insight to the next level and putting in in context. Insight is important, but what do you do with it?

Once you have gathered the relevant information and gain insight, the next step is to take initiative! ControlUp not only tells you what is happening and what it means, it includes the ability to take action to fix the problem. This is not just monitoring, this is troubleshooting and problem solving. Gather relevant information, gain insight and take initiative.

The ControlUp architecture was built with a similar approach. Rather than building on on-premise pre-packaged software solution, ControlUp chose the cloud-based model. This allows for rapid deployment. Many customers have ControlUp installed and running in 30 minutes or less. This cloud based architecture also allows ControlUp to take advantage of big data capabilities and helps its customers learn from historical data. This approach also enables to ControlUp to begin to leverage exciting new technologies like machine learning and AI to gain more useful insights of what the data means, and more effective and rapid ways to identity and resolve issues as they arise.

Due diligence is an important process to deal with change. As part of that process, I spoke to several partners and customers with significant experience with ControlUp as a company and its products. The feedback was very upbeat and positive. A recurring theme was that ControlUp is innovative and inventive. I am confident ControlUp is transforming from from a scrappy startup and is on its way to becoming a major player in IT infrastructure management.

I am excited for this new challenge and look forward to the journey. Change is inevitable and relentless. Taking a step back and looking at the challenges you face brought on by change is critical to success.  I encourage you to do your due diligence as well. Visit ControlUp.com , download the free trial and see for yourself how ControlUp helps you go to a new level of thinking when it comes to the changes and challenges you face in your IT infrastructure.