Össur
Delivering a Great Digital Experience Without Limitations

Founded in Iceland in 1971 by prosthetist and amputee Össur Kristinsson, Össur develops and manufactures non-invasive orthopaedics equipment, including bracing and support products, compression therapy, and prosthetics. Össur focuses its efforts and expertise on helping people to be confident, safe and mobile, regardless of injuries or conditions that could compromise their quality of life. The company has an extensive network of offices and operational sites in the Americas, Europe and Asia, serving a diverse geographical spread with a comprehensive portfolio of products and services.

Össur‘s entire IT infrastructure is managed by a central team of just five people, based in Iceland and headed by the Infrastructure and Cloud Architect Einar Dagfinnur Klemensson. This small department is responsible for IT decision-making and deployment and is augmented by local support staff around the globe.

To support its fast-growing business, the Össur team selected ControlUp to help them manage legacy infrastructure and deliver an exceptional digital experience for the company’s 4,000 employees.

ControlUp Makes Things Simple

“Össur is acquiring multiple businesses that bring with them a lot of legacy software and hardware. Using ControlUp to monitor and manage our environment has proved to be extremely helpful in troubleshooting old group policies that slow down logon times,” says Róbert Þórir Sigurðsson, Senior System Administrator at Össur. “Now, we can do the proper cleanup needed so our users’ digital experience is improved as much as possible.”

ControlUp also helps them see how both legacy and new applications/ processes behave. With ControlUp Insights’ historical data, it’s simple for the team to spot anomalies even in systems in which they aren’t experts.

“One of ControlUp’s hidden gems is the compare feature,” Sigurðsson told us. “I have solved countless problems just by being able to compare multiple servers and easily copy missing data over or starting services that might have been for some reason turned off or crashed.”

Delivering a Great Digital Experience

“Össur is growing quickly; we currently have more than 4500 employees,” says Sigurðsson. “Our IT team is small—there are just five of us—so we need a tool that is easy to implement and that can scale and grow with us. We invested in ControlUp because it does just that; setting it up takes about five minutes.”

For Sigurðsson and his team, the most important metric is, at the end of the day, how their end-users feel and what the quality of their digital experience is. That means optimal login time, latency, and application availability. With ControlUp, they can immediately see what is causing slowdowns in their environment, and they can correct problems quickly. Before implementing ControlUp, it was not uncommon for Össur’s endusers to experience login times in excess of three minutes—causing frustration for both the employee and for IT. Now, because they can spot the root causes of issues right away, they have shortened that logon time to an average of 15-20 seconds.

Delivering Great Value

Time, as they say, is money. For Össur, a big part of ControlUp’s value is the time it saves them.

“It saves us so much time,” says Sigurðsson. “Things that used to take me maybe three or four hours now take just a couple of minutes, and I can accomplish so much more with ControlUp than I ever would in the old days.”

Like many companies around the world, when COVID-19 hit, Össur’s remote workforce grew from 250 to 1800 users. ControlUp helped them make the transition easily.

“ControlUp’s Remote Desktop monitoring is vitally important for us. It is the first thing I turn on in the morning, and the last thing that I turn off (at the end of the day),” explained Sigurðsson. “I keep it on through the whole day—and I connect to all the computers in our environment—and I work in ControlUp 100% of my day.”

Helping IT Sleep Better at Night

It’s not just the experience of Össur’s end-users that has been improved by implementing ControlUp; it has improved the quality of life for their small IT team, too. Össur maintains 130+ offices around the world in Japan, Australia, USA, Europe, China, and more. Before deploying ControlUp, if there were problems in countries in different time zones, the team would have to wake in the middle of the night to fix things and make sure employees could do their jobs. Now, with ControlUp Automate, they are able to set triggers and fix problems without ever having to get out of bed. “I would not have thought getting a good night’s rest would come from buying a bit of software, but that’s exactly the case with ControlUp,” joked Sigurðsson.

No Looking Back

For Sigurðsson, going back to life before ControlUp would be near impossible. “I wouldn’t be able to function at all without it,” he says. “ControlUp makes everything so simple, I’ve almost forgotten how we used to do things or if they were even possible. Because they know I have ControlUp, managers from other parts of the company call me when there are problems in their environments. They know that even if I don’t know their systems, I can tell them, in just a couple of minutes, what the problem is and how to fix it.”

For Össur, there is no going back to the way things were. They have plans to expand their ControlUp implementation to include ControlUp Edge DX, which will allow them to monitor the physical endpoints of their work-from-anywhere employees and deliver an even better digital experience.

For Sigurðsson, it comes down to this: “ControlUp is how I work. I work with ControlUp 100% of my day. I don’t work without ControlUp.”