 Welcome back everyone. Live coverage here at VMware Explorer 23, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante, our 13th year Dave covering VMworld. We never missed the year, even during the pandemic, we did the remote interviews. So it's been a great run and as Broadcom's on the horizon. Next Gen, VMware should be here. And we have one of the big booths here, control up, we've got the management team and the new news, the new newly minted CEOs here, Jed Ayers, announced today CEO. Good to see you, thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me, John. We've got the co-founder and executive chairman, head of product strategy, as I've got up. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. So first of all, congratulations. We're going to get into the product, great growth. We'll get into that. New CEO, you got on board, being the co-founder, great entrepreneurial venture. You know, it's always hard. It's always messy. The original story always gets better as you're more successful, but it's hard to do startups. You've been successful. Congratulations. It's been a roller coaster for sure. Congratulations. So why the new CEO, what's the change, what's the motivation? So what we feel is that in order for the company to get to the next stage, we need to develop many things that we don't currently have the way we want to have it, like much more partnerships, alliances, more enterprise motion. And I think Jed is bringing a lot of this experience and we're super happy to have him. I think he has proven records and that's what we need in order to get to the next stage. Dave and I will get into the product. We'd love to talk about flywheels and we're going to have things grow organically. There's always a pattern and we'll get into that. But Jed, talk about the why this was attracted to you. Obviously, when you get lightning in a bottle, it kind of has that trend. You see something out there, it's got growth. It's kind of no, some go to market, but like going the next level means team, scale, marketing, bigger operations. What's your vision? What's motivating you? Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the show. It's a revered seat to sit here and be an alumni of the Cube. So thanks for having me, Dave and John. You're welcome. But yeah, obviously ControlUp was a company that was on my radar. I came from iJell and another European hardware, thin client company that we turned into a software company and we were a big partner of ControlUp. And I saw the sort of technical product, the growth that these guys were having in a very short amount of time. And I realized, and it got to meet us off and really you realize the sort of chemistry you have with the founder and the opportunity that to take the enterprise business and sort of supersize some of the deals that they've been closing, the alliances, Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, building on those. And then really the channel, and that's really my background, is bringing channel partners and scaling an organization through not hiring 50 more sales reps, but really using the channel. And I have a long history in the end user compute space with the sort of best channel partners. So a pretty quick capacity to scale the product out of this product led motion. Yeah, you've got a lot of experience in the channel. There was a CRN article that just published that sort of went pretty deep on that. But I'd be interested in your focus of the channel. How do you attract channel? How do you get them excited? You know, we know they care about margin, but obviously they care about relationships as well. So what's your initial thinking about the channel? Yeah, so we look for people that have deep domain expertise, first of all, in this space, right? So they know how to spell VMware and Citrix and Microsoft. And then we really look for the investment that they're willing to make together and build a plan. And so both sides are going to benefit. And it's really about building recurring revenue for these solution providers. So obviously a lot of them are looking at managed services. They're looking at professional services. And they're looking at the program. So both the technology as a differentiator for their practice and the economics of being that recurring revenue. So that's what we look for. And there's a short list of them that really are the best of the best in Europe and in the U.S. And I have most of them on speed dial. Let's talk about the domain. How do you guys think about your market? How do you talk about it, phrase it? So the market is digital employee experience. And many people are confused that with APM. But this is actually the way for the enterprises to make sure that their employees are getting good experience from the dozens or hundreds of applications that they're using. And I think what we see in the recent years is a constant transition from measuring app time to measuring the real employee experience. How does the employee feel when he uses the line of business applications, et cetera, being able to quantify it, track it and optimize it. And that's what we've been doing for many years. And our concept is to support any type of desktop, any type of any application at any location. So the market is just becoming harder and harder as people work in a hybrid model from home, from office, from the train. Becoming much more difficult to support those employees and making sure that they get the experience they need. And that's where we come to aid those. What was the origination idea? Was it because the change was so rapid with infrastructure and the tools? Was there more tools, less platforms? Was there too many platforms? What was the problem? What was the main problem? Well, I think the main problem was lack of visibility. It's very difficult to get good visibility with all those technologies that are out there, okay? I mean, if you look at any large organization, they have some investment in virtual desktop, either VMware or Citrix, cloud desktops, okay? Microsoft, maybe something else. They have those physical desktops and it's very difficult to understand what's going on, okay, like what kind of performance I'm providing to my employees. So, I think this is how we started to provide visibility and then very soon after that, we started also providing automation and optimization tools to not only be able to see the problem, but actually to fix the problem and to make the experience better. What was the customer experience, the competition like at that time? Was it fragmented? What was the, where did you guys hit the bullseye, right? What got right there to vis-a-vis the competition? So, obviously we always had some competition. We started from the virtual desktop infrastructure, okay? And we became the best product in that field. And then later on, we just expanded to other areas as well. When I think about like a workday, the classification of business, the workday sells to the HR function, but IT's always involved, right? They've got to throw holy water on it. So, who do you sell to? What's the role of IT? How do you integrate with all these SaaS apps that are out there? So, we are selling to the IT, okay? Okay. Just to the IT. And we have several, you know, we have a lot of integrations with third parties systems like Microsoft Azure, VMware, vSphere, Horizon, Citrix, obviously, we just integrate, you know, with those infrastructure applications. And we also have all kinds of generic ways to measure their experience of specific applications, okay, SaaS applications, local applications, and unified communication applications, which becoming very big, yeah. And so, what exactly are you measuring? You said before, it's not APM, you know, it's not just uptime. It's, what is it exactly that you're trying to optimize for? So, what we're measuring is what kind of performance you're getting from the device you're using as you're using the line of business application. So, I'll give you an example, okay? For example, you're using Zoom. And all of a sudden, something doesn't work very well. You get lags, you know, you're getting broken. We can look at all the data metrics that we collect and say, hey, that's because you got away from the Wi-Fi, maybe you should probably get closer to the Wi-Fi and the problem is gone, okay? Or we can track the latency and say, hey, maybe there's a problem with this ISP in this specific region, okay? So, that's just, you know, one out of hundreds of other problems. And in doing it in real time, and I think that's one of the big differentiators that I saw when I looked at the company is that it's like a real-time solution, right? Where a lot of the other solutions are looking at it. What happened yesterday? Exactly. And so, a lot of times they're asking, yesterday's news. IT is able to fix it before the guy even calls over on the ticket. Yeah. So, yeah, the window is three seconds after one year. So, it's a pretty wide window. Is that, take us through this as you guys became successful. What was the moment you started to see more downloads? When did you guys realize this is, wow, this is happening? And then what was the reaction on your customer side? What was the experience like? Take us through kind of the play-by-play of that moment where it's like, okay, it's crossing over, this product's hunting, this is happening. So, from the company perspective, we were bootstrapped for two years before we took some VC money, right? And initially we developed control of our own internal purposes just to fix problems quicker. And then our customers would start looking at our, behind the shoulders, looking at what we're doing and they, wow, can we buy it? So, we started playing with the idea and we put it in the internet and nobody came, nobody downloaded, right? And we didn't have a lot of marketing money, right? So, we started as a free tool, okay? Just provided it for the community and then this great guy from Citrix posted a blog about it and all of a sudden we got like hundreds of downloads from these crazy enterprises and like the first couple of months we already had like 4,000 downloads and we saw the usage, right? And we said, okay, we have something really near. We tried to do as much as we could with our own money. It was very difficult and then we decided to take some VC money and that's obviously, you know, it's a decent amount of VC money too, right? You raised what, 140 million? Is that about right? Is that a current number? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, and so what are you doing with the money? Where are you applying it? Oh, we're just sitting on it. Yeah. That's nice if you don't need it. Yeah, good. So, the reason we raised the last round is mainly for inorganic growth expansion. We have the DNA of being very mindful to expenses. Yeah. Okay, so not to say we're, you know, we're almost cash flow positive. Yeah, yeah. You got a war chest. Huh? You got a nice war chest. Yeah. Make some acquisitions. It's a good market for AccuHires right now. You're in a buyer's market. I agree, I agree. And stay tuned. We have, yeah, we'll ask a new- I mean, it's really about building a platform, right? And being able to tuck some of these things in and this is what our partnership is about, where he can really focus on that platform and I can focus on, like, you sure the world knows about it. Jay, let's get into the economic side of obviously the channel selection, the go to market, you know, indirect versus direct sales. Like you mentioned that earlier, it's expensive to go direct sales. You don't really need it here, do you? You got a platform and you got a product that's easy to use. That's kind of like a perfect channel product. And the channel partners also have all the vendors that you want to manage. So they're kind of in the mix. Is that what's the reason? Yeah, there's 100 million seats of VDI sitting out there. We have about 4 million that are using our product today. So there's a lot of headroom to... The VDI space was very channel-led in terms of who installed all that. And so really bringing the channel along to help us grow that VDI side, but then also going onto the physical side, right? The fastest growing thing in the portfolio today is this edge acquisition that Asaf made back in 2020. And so this is actually the other part of the channel, right? It's more of the people that are interested in looking at the physical devices as well. So your TAM is those 100 million VDI seats, plus the edge... Right, which is another 700 million. Something I was going to say, it's like... I was going to say triple, but it's seven X. The expectations for some pretty significant ARR growth in the next 24 months is there, right? Like as we add in the channel, as we add in more of an enterprise sale, selling motion, we hired the enterprise sales leader from Citrix. He started the same day as I did yesterday, Tom Holland. He was managing a billion dollar book of business for Citrix, so he kind of knows where a lot of those bigger Citrix customers are that would love control of. When the show floor opened yesterday, John and I were walking around. First of all, we were impressed and surprised at how packed it was, and it was filled with customers. It wasn't just a bunch of booth people, but all the... We went by your booth, it was some cool demos, but it was a good-sized booth, and it was packed. Yeah, we did hundreds of demos yesterday, and yeah, we're quite thrilled with the number of people at this show. I don't know if you know the number, I think it's in excess of 10,000. I would say it's around 10, maybe, 10 to 12. What did you guys do with the booth? What was any news that you guys had there? What was the news? You mentioned the edge. That was part of the news here, right? What was... Quickly explain the news here at VMware. So usually what we're doing in the booth is just showing live demos as much as possible. And I mean, that's working for us the best. We get people excited, and then we follow up on these leads, and we feed on them for the next year or so. So we're really known for that VDI solution, and being the best in class in VDI. So we're trying to expose more people to this physical Edge DX product. So we just announced this morning that a 50-free trial. So in the spirit of the product-led download history and the heritage of the company, and yeah, we've already had dozens of people download it, and so we expect hopefully a moment like the original vlog will happen, especially with everybody listening on the Cube. We'll go out and try it out. What are the conversations like with the customer? What kind of questions are they asking? Are they asking, like, what do you do? Who are you? Or how can I do solve this problem? What is that conversation? Yeah, usually that's the journey. Do you support this kind of thing, like Thin Client, Fat Client, Slenox, Max? Yeah, what kind of automations and what kind of problems we can solve? A lot of it's around login times, too. Like, just sort of a really simple productivity inhibitor. Basic stuff. That we're helping people radically reduce the time. We actually have a video crew here also that's capturing some of the great stories that people that are coming up and are like, you've really helped us, right? The customer satisfaction, when you make someone's life easier, it's really amazing what happens. The fan base you get, you don't even know it's out there. Yeah, it's a really, really great word of mouth. We have an online community that we built on Slack. It's got thousands of people on it that are kind of supporting each other. And yeah, that has helped with the virality of the product. Well, you guys got a great product opportunity. Congratulations on the success. I liked the bootstrapping and then gave it to the VC for the growth. You need the cash to grow. That's what we, you see the playbook. That's the flywheel. So congratulations and you're going to scale it out. Go to the next level and great stuff. For the last minute we have left. Why don't you guys both put in a plug for the company, what you're working on, what your goals are, some of these you want to do with the product. Give a quick plug. What are you looking for? Are you hiring? Yeah, so we're going to obviously be building out a big U.S. team. We're actually going to move the headquarters of the company, the U.S. Contrary to everyone's belief, I'm going to put it in San Francisco. So that'll be exciting. Plenty of office space. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it's really about building out, you know, a world-class enterprise sales team, building out a great channel that really knows the end user compute space and wants to lead with a very differentiated solution. And building tighter relationships with Citrix, Microsoft, and of course, VMware. VMware resells our product. So we're going to look to, they sold about 160 customers so far this year, our product. So we're going to build on that partnership. And yeah, look for us to. Well, Raghu's right there. He's coming on next. So when you're walking out the cubes, shake his hand. Exactly. You know, it's been a good partnership. What's the plug? Put the plug in for the company. Especially the co-founder. You guys be proud and excited at the same time. You get the product strategy, which means you get to look at the future and make sure the team's hitting the right direction. What's your opinion? So, we know we're planning, we're planning on defining, you know, defining, better defining the deck space. One of the most exciting things we're going to announce pretty soon is a really cool security addition. To that space. And what we want to bring to our customers is the ability for the IT teams to be proactive about all kinds of security vulnerabilities in the desktop assets that they manage. So that's one of the biggest things we're going to bring to the market pretty soon. Awesome. Congratulations. Jed Gresh is on the new assignment. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on the queue. Thank you for sharing the story. Great story. Good luck. Well, thanks for all you guys. Thank you very much. 35,000 interviews over the last 13 years. We're still cranking, we don't give up. We'll be out tonight doing some business. Best of jets of commerce, we'd like to say. We did all the stories last night. I heard so much, so much information last night. People don't realize that I'm sitting there listening. A lot of good data in the community. We're a great community led too. Well, yeah, thank you for all you guys. Thank you for that interview. All right, we'll be right back with more live coverage. We've got the circuit of execs coming in from VMware. Rad, who's up next? Stay with us. Don't leave. Stay with us for the CEO coming on. Talk about his vision. We'll hear about AI, multi-cloud, super-cloud, and Broadcom. We'll see what he has to say. We'll be right back.