Jed Ayres “Growth does not come from adding logos. It comes from aligning with people who believe in the same mission.”
When I look back on our journey toward hitting the $100M ARR milestone, I find myself thinking less about the number and more about the conversations that got us here. Milestones look impressive on a slide, but the real substance shows up in the stories our partners bring us, the messy troubleshooting calls, the onsite sessions where people gather around a screen and discover what is actually happening in an environment that has been “mysterious” for months or sometimes years.
If you ask me what I remember most from the past year, it is not a dashboard or a metric. It is the people who moved the work forward. The MSP leaders who sat with us until 9 p.m. walking through a customer outage. The GSI architects, who said, “Give us the raw data and we’ll show you something you’ll want to build into the product.” The channel partners who invited us into rooms we would never have reached on our own.
Those interactions shaped our roadmap as much as any internal planning meeting.
A Partner Ecosystem Rooted in Real World Proof
A story from earlier this year captures the value of this ecosystem better than any pitch deck ever could. One of our partners had been supporting a large organization that struggled with poor VDI performance for so long that frustration became “the norm.” Everyone blamed the infrastructure. Nothing ever changed.
Then the partner brought in ControlUp, pulled up the data, and within minutes saw that the main issue had nothing to do with VMware, Citrix, the data center, or any of the usual suspects. The user’s internet latency was off the charts. The help desk had been trying to fix a problem that was physically impossible for them to fix. The customer finally had clarity, and honestly, relief.
This sort of clarity keeps happening across industries.
Another partner recently worked with a customer whose engineering team spent entire days fighting freezing applications. The partner drilled down into the ControlUp for Apps data and uncovered a simple registry issue that had been killing productivity. A tiny fix, but it changed the employee experience overnight.
And then there was the healthcare organization whose IT team kept getting blindsided by morning logon storms. A partner set up a workflow using ControlUp that quietly monitored for four-minute logons. When the storm hit one morning, the automation started firing before anyone in the NOC realized something was wrong. The team fixed the issue before the NOC even picked up the phone. Their major incident bridge never happened. The partner didn’t just save the day. They prevented a day from ever being bad in the first place.
When I hear these stories, I see a consistent thread. Our partners don’t treat the platform as a tool. They treat it as part of their toolkit for helping customers build healthier, calmer, more predictable IT environments.
Why Partners Matter Even More in the AI Era
The shift toward AI-assisted operations won’t be delivered by a single vendor. It will come from the people who understand the human side of change. MSPs and GSIs are often the ones explaining to business leaders why a slow logon is not “just an inconvenience” but a productivity drain. They are the ones connecting the dots between driver crashes, application freezes, WAN performance, remote work conditions, and employee frustration.
And because they are embedded in customer environments, they know which automation is safe to roll out, which one needs a pilot, and which one should never be attempted at 9 a.m. on a Monday.
As we roll more intelligence into ControlUp ONE, these partners help translate innovation into something customers can actually use. They tell us when a feature is too complex, or when a workflow should be more flexible, or when a dashboard would make more sense if we surfaced one metric and buried another. That feedback loop is how the product grows in the right direction.
A More Human Take on Growth
If you ask me what success looks like, it is not a bigger platform. It is a stronger network of people who trust each other enough to solve problems together.
I think about the partner who shared the story of an employee who kept getting blue screens while her IT team brushed it off because they never saw the crash happen. ControlUp surfaced every event, the partner tracked down the faulty driver, and the employee finally felt heard. That’s not a product story. That is a human story made possible by the right partnership.
Or the times a partner logged into a customer’s environment, saw a dozen users suffering through freezing apps, and used ControlUp to pinpoint the issue in minutes. That kind of support isn’t flashy. It is patient and thoughtful. It is also the type of work that wins customers for life.
So as we move into the next chapter of ControlUp’s journey, I feel grateful to be surrounded by people who do the hard work, the quiet work, and sometimes the heroic work that customers never actually see.
Our momentum did not start with a marketing plan. It started with partners who shared our belief that the digital employee experience should not be a guessing game. It should be observable, fixable, and continually improving.
That shared belief is the real reason we’re growing.
