Leading UK Independent Builders' Merchant leverages VDI to underpin its growth strategy
LONDON, Oct. 01, 2025, a global leader in Digital Employee Experience, the UK's largest independent builders' merchant, has implemented the ControlUp ONEplatform to optimize its IT infrastructure and support operations across 335 branches and more than 4,000 endpoints.
Founded in 1990, Huws Gray Group has grown rapidly through acquisitions and now offers a comprehensive range of building materials and supplies to both trade professionals and DIY customers. A major milestone came in 2021 with the £520 million acquisition of Grafton Group Plc's UK merchanting business, which doubled the company's size and significantly expanded its national footprint. Today, the group includes a wide portfolio of 13 distinct operating brands, including Huws Gray, Hirebase, Timber Group, Electricbase, Frontline Bathrooms, Civils & Lintels and Lloyd Worrall and has more than 4,000 employees across the UK.
As part of its post-acquisition IT strategy, Huws Gray Group faced the challenge of unifying and managing an IT estate comprising a mix of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions - Citrix Workspace and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) - in addition to thousands of physical Microsoft Windows-based laptops and desktops.
Given the company's acquisition-based growth strategy-where VDI played a key role in accelerating the integration of acquired firms, Huws Gray turned to ControlUp to help streamline IT operations and improve digital performance across its expanding IT estate and workforce.
"We chose ControlUp because we needed a central, unified DEX platform that could support both our on-prem and cloud-based infrastructure, while saving our IT Service Desk team valuable time," says Nathan Draper, Chief Technology Officer at Huws Gray Group. "ControlUp gives us comprehensive real-time insights 24/7, proactive alerts and automated remediation which helps us stay ahead of issues without adding IT support headcount."
Huws Gray Group has deployed the ControlUp ONE platform across its VDI environments and Windows 11 laptops and desktops used by on-site employees, remote field employees, and home-based employees accessing the network via VPN.
"ControlUp gives us a 'single pane of glass' holistic view of our IT systems and has transformed how we support our 2,500 VDI users and 1,700 desktop users," adds Meurig Parry, Head of IT Infrastructure at Huws Gray Group. "From running scripts to make sure an application isn't consuming excessive CPU to managing disk space and user profiles - and even our SAN storage performance - ControlUp helps us to prevent problems before colleagues know they exist."
Key results from using ControlUp ONE include:
- Significant reduction in support tickets, saving over 40 hours per month through real-time monitoring. This allows the 15-person IT support team to focus on strategic projects rather than reactive troubleshooting. Huws Gray Group is also leveraging ControlUp's built-in tools to run ad hoc scripts and remotely shadow desktops, thereby streamlining and accelerating investigative work to resolve desktop issues. In addition, error logs from the ControlUp ONE platform can easily be reviewed without physically checking a user's device.
"Without ControlUp, we'd probably need a bigger IT team," adds Draper. "It enables us to remain lean and agile-even while supporting a business of our size and complexity.
- Automation of repetitive tasks, such as automatically restarting applications or cleaning outdated user profile data which consumes storage space and can affect VDI performance.
- Improved capacity planning through customisable thresholds, for example, allowing IT teams to assess infrastructure needs such as when to add more storage or CPU resources, and automate actions like sending alerts, terminating processes, or initiating cleanup tasks when thresholds are met.
- Improved monitoring of key business applications, such as CAD and proof-of-delivery software which checks server health, thereby minimizing downtime.
- Enhanced visibility into endpoint performance, even for remote employees outside the corporate network, helping identify issues like Wi-Fi reliability or software issues - all presented via ControlUp's DEX scoring tool.
"The transparency and community support we get from ControlUp are also excellent," adds Parry. "From Slack channels to user groups, the collaboration and account management from them is genuine, open and helpful. It's more than a vendor relationship-it's a genuine partnership."
Looking ahead, Huws Gray Group plans to expand its use of AVD to support various GPU-intensive CAD applications with ControlUp continuing to play a critical role in managing the performance of its Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) environments-which are crucial to the day-to-day functioning of the organisation.
Simon Townsend, ControlUp's SVP of Marketing & Office of the CTO, concludes, "Managing IT across a large, geographically dispersed organization like Huws Gray Group - with thousands of devices and users - is clearly a complicated task. That's where real-time DEX tools like ControlUp truly shine, providing deeper operational insight, improving efficiency, and simplify day-to-day IT management."
About ControlUp
ControlUp is a leader in DEX, unifying Digital Employee Experience and IT operations in one powerful platform built for modern workplace management. By combining real-time monitoring, intelligent insights and proactive remediation, ControlUp accelerates the shift toward Autonomous Endpoint Management.
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