ControlUp, a company reinventing IT operations with its AI platform, announced that SimpsonHaugh, the UK-based, award-winning architecture practice, is now protecting up to £2.56 million of productive capacity annually through the combination of its VDI environment and ControlUp’s Digital Employee Experience (DEX) technology — a significant increase since the practice first measured the platform’s return in 2024.
SimpsonHaugh has used ControlUp to monitor and optimise its VDI environment since 2024, when the practice began a multi-million-pound investment in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, VMware vSphere and NVIDIA vGPU technology to support its 100-strong team across studios in Manchester, London and Birmingham. Two years on, Dave Moyes, IT Partner at SimpsonHaugh, has re-examined the figures — and found the platform’s value has continued to grow.
“Since the original release, our average hourly charge-out rate has increased to approximately £125. We currently have 70 fee earners, each with around 1,950 available working hours per year,” explains Moyes. “Based on our service-desk statistics, improvements in resolution times, operational experience and staff feedback, we estimate that the combination of our VDI environment and ControlUp protects or recovers approximately 15% of productive working time that might otherwise be lost through system performance issues, disruption and delays in identifying and resolving ICT problems. Across our 70 fee earners, that is equivalent to approximately £2.56 million of productive capacity protected annually.”
Moyes is careful to frame this as the gross potential value of productive capacity rather than a direct cash saving or guaranteed increase in fee income, since not every recovered hour is billed to a client. The benefit is felt through improved project delivery, reduced disruption and less reliance on staff using their own time to meet deadlines.
“Historically, time lost during the working day often had to be recovered through longer working hours,” says Moyes. “ControlUp helps us give that time back to our people, supporting work-life balance, personal development and a more sustainable approach to project delivery.”
ControlUp is also creating significant capacity within SimpsonHaugh’s ICT team. With an experienced desktop engineer’s salary now around £40,000 before employment overheads, Moyes estimates that ControlUp’s monitoring, automation and diagnostic capabilities deliver operational capacity comparable to as many as two additional team members — not by replacing headcount, but by allowing the existing team to manage a larger, more complex environment without a corresponding rise in headcount. Automated workflows now support routine activities such as starters and leavers, project creation and archiving, while ControlUp’s diagnostic and AI-assisted capabilities help the team move faster from a user’s reported symptoms to the underlying cause.
The platform has also helped SimpsonHaugh consolidate its ICT application portfolio, reducing the need for separate tools including an additional remote-support solution, while its telemetry and logs provide useful input to the practice’s security operations team, supporting infrastructure monitoring and the investigation of potential security events.
“ControlUp is no longer simply a DEX monitoring platform within SimpsonHaugh,” adds Moyes. “It has become an integral part of how we manage, support and improve the working environment.”
“SimpsonHaugh’s experience shows what a mature DEX deployment can deliver over time,” says Simon Townsend, SVP of Marketing and Office of the CTO at ControlUp. “Real-time visibility combined with automated remediation doesn’t just fix problems faster — it frees IT teams to focus on higher-value work, while giving employees back time that used to disappear into system delays.”
