You may know Citrix Synergy as the annual assembly of thousands of Citrix users worldwide, but what you may not know is how many ControlUp’ers actually partake. What started as boothless Yoni Avital (COO) and Asaf Ganot (CEO) opening their laptops to demo ControlUp in front of unsuspecting Citrix customers has blossomed into a massive purple booth, complete with nine demo stations and never-ending traffic. I think it’s safe to say that we took Synergy by storm, and here’s the calm before it all began.
Aside from parading around the booth schmoozing with attendees, talking about ControlUp, and standing on a table yelling raffle winners each day, I was on a mission. With my brand new external iPhone microphone in hand, I walked ready in selfie mode to find and interview those who use ControlUp day in and day out. I wanted to see what people had to say. How does ControlUp help them every day? For what use cases does ControlUp bring the most value?
My first quest began at the party we threw at an arcade bar the night before Synergy. There, I met Aaron, who became my first victim. (Did I say victim? I meant, uh, interviewee!)
Aaron told me he’s been using ControlUp for about three years, and uses it mainly for his Virtual Desktop (VDI) deployment. “We can drill into the user sessions and see what’s really causing stress and alleviate that stress right on the fly…It’s a lifesaver to find out where your pains are at and get right to the source.” Alright, this is a good start.
After the night of Monday arcade debauchery came to an end, Tuesday morning finally rolled around and it was time to watch the booth flood with thousands of Citrix Synergy attendees, ControlUp customers, and new faces.
I first met Matt, who’s been using ControlUp for just under one year. “Recently [ControlUp] was super helpful to us because we had a new security tool that every once in a while was checking in and sucking up all the host resource consumption. We really wouldn’t have been able to find it except for the fact that we had ControlUp. It made it very clear and easy for us to figure out where it was and fix the problem.” Clear and easy. That’s the stuff I was looking for.
My friend and long-time email buddy Alan approached our booth later on, and he told me that at first, ControlUp helped his Citrix team figure out why exactly their users had slow logon times. “But, more of the day to day would be finding out who’s running what or if there’s an application that’s gone out of control [and] finding out where they are. Quick little updates using the scripting functionality to run things in the session. We use it pretty much daily.”
End-user experience, application monitoring, pinpointing performance issues, script based actions, daily use…this mission was looking good.
Fast forward to day 2 of expo. Our glorious purple “Evolve to Resolve” t-shirts had arrived! If you thought there couldn’t be any more purple in the ControlUp booth, you thought wrong. While ensuring that every passerby received a t-shirt and a handshake, I met Alan and Greg, who have been using ControlUp at their company for three years.
Greg expressed that he lives in ControlUp. Resisting literal residency jokes, I asked him to elaborate. “It is the first tool I launch every morning when I show up into the office. It tells me immediately the overall health of my [Citrix] environment and if I need to react to anything at the moment.” Real-time monitoring. “It helps me determine how well our servers are being managed, if our endpoints have enough resources to them, and whether I need to spin up more application servers to handle the current load.” Real-time management actions. Alan chimed in to explain how they used script based actions to see users’ map drives as well as their map printers.
When I realized I had not heard the same answer twice, I knew I was getting somewhere. ControlUp has been making peoples’ lives easier. After all, isn’t that exactly what a good tool is for?
It doesn’t even end there.
On day 3, Chris expressed that he had zero visibility before ControlUp. Having his NetScalers, Citrix, Exchange, and vCenter all in one place has put his environment in much better shape. “I don’t know what we would do without it.”
Single pane of glass and real-time visibility.
Though I only outlined a few for you here, I walked out of Synergy with a total of 15 interviews. 15 users who told me how they use ControlUp and exactly why it’s been critical to their day-to-day operations at work. 15 people who gave me reason after reason to continue to believe in my company’s product and mission.
If you’ve ever wondered what customers are really saying about ControlUp, I hope you’ve been able to find your answers. I’ll end with this – the final question I raised in each interview was whether the user would recommend ControlUp.
“”Yes, absolutely. And actually I have recommended ControlUp to, I don’t know how many, but a bunch of people.” “Absolutely, everybody.” “Absolutely, 100 times out of 100.” “Absolutely. It’s a life saver.” “Every day over any other tool out there I would get ControlUp.”