Recently, ControlUp announced the release of ControlUp Edge DX, a groundbreaking new technology that allows IT to observe, analyze, and optimize not just their end-users’ virtual desktops, but their physical endpoints, too. We call this “last-mile monitoring,” and it’s what makes ControlUp the one Digital Employee Experience management platform that provides a true, end-to-end view into the EUC environment. 

For software providers like ControlUp, there’s nothing more fantastic than when a customer raves about the solutions we provide. So, when we heard from Tehama about how ControlUp Edge DX powers their Desktop Intelligence & Automation offering and how it’s saving their customers loads of time and money, we couldn’t wait to talk to them.

Long before 2020, Tehama saw the remote work writing on the wall. Knowledge workers across the globe were increasingly demanding a work-from-home (or work-from-coffee shop, work-from-plane, work-from-beach, or, really, work-from-anywhere) option in their jobs. They wanted to be able to help their customers deliver great employee experiences and set out to create a solution that would make it a reality.

Then COVID-19 reared its head and the way the world work changed forever, almost overnight. Tehama’s solution, powered by ControlUp Edge DX, was just the tool for our new world order.

Visibility, flexibility, and control for IT teams

Stardate: Spring 2020. The global workforce is forced out of the office and into their homes. They connected their laptops and devices, logging into systems from a countless endpoints, connecting to the internet in vastly different ways. There were complex workarounds—how to help kids who were doing school from home, partners who were taking meetings in the next room, and pets who wanted attention (for the record, we here at ControlUp, want to see all the puppers and kittehs and birbs) and for many, they had to learn an entirely new style of working and leading teams. There were myriad issues with spotty Wi-Fi or other network issues, not to mention security. And all of this and the devices their end-users were using were out of view of IT; they were flying blind.

Enterprises need a true, end-to-end view into the health and performance of their teams’ endpoints, be able to spot trends to predict future needs, and respond to issues quickly and proactively to deploy software updates, without disrupting employee productivity, across hundreds of desktops and Windows-, Mac-, Linux-, or IGEL-based devices in mere minutes instead of days.

“We had a customer that had to update a file for licensing across hundreds of BYO devices that weren’t company-owned,” said Jaymes Davis, Director of Product Strategy, Tehama. “As you might imagine, this presented a huge logistical problem. Before we had Edge DX, updating this one file would have taken weeks using PowerShell, with IT running into incompatibility issues between devices, login issues, and more. ControlUp Edge DX made it possible to update everything in under an hour.”

What’s more, before the pandemic, when customers would call Tehama’s support line to report problems,—like being able to log in to their desktop, but not be able to reach a particular server—it used to take lots of trial and error: “try this; did that work?” to find the source of a problem. With ControlUp Edge DX, the root cause of problems can typically be spotted before the customer even finishes describing the problem; IT can see it all.

“We put an Edge DX agent on the endpoint connecting to the virtual desktop and an agent on the resource. Every ‘hop’ in the users’ processes gets an agent, so IT can see, in an instant, where the problem is,” Davis says.

Beyond solving nagging problems like these, Edge DX helps Tehama optimize the digital employee experience by collecting and indexing various metrics across their customers’ infrastructure. The Edge DX agent allows IT to see everything that’s going on with users’ physical endpoints. System administrators can see where the desktop is, what features are enabled, which usernames are set, and more. These metrics get indexed by ControlUp Edge DX and are indispensable in auditing, spotting trends, and planning for future events.

Saving Time, Saving Money, Staying Productive

Time is money, as they saying goes, and ControlUp Edge DX shows that time and time again. When they implement the solution for their customers, Tehama does Day 1, Week 1, and Month 1 assessments of its effectiveness. For one of their customers who runs a large call center, Tehama deployed the Edge DX solution for approximately 1600 users. On just the first day of use, the customer saw increases in their quality of service, time saved in desktop and application management, as well as problem resolution, and that wasn’t all. After a month, time savings and user experience improvements were significant enough for the company to project an annual savings of more than $115,000.

Keeping Teams Productive, Anytime, Anywhere

“Work from anywhere has become the industry standard for our Enterprise customers,” Davis says. “Today we are able to support this demanding requirement at scale with ControlUp Edge DX. This new capability helps us deliver a best-in-class digital experience for all our customers.”

2020 thrust a whole new way of working onto the world in an instant. Workers had to contend with patched-together technologies, complex workarounds, and tackle difficulties few were prepared for. The post-pandemic workforce remains distributed and remote, and could limit IT Ops leaders’ visibility into endpoint, connectivity and application performance from everywhere, leaving them vulnerable to issues beyond their control, such as an ISP or home Wi-Fi issue. But with ControlUp Edge DX, tackling these problems is easy.