Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) is a virtualization solution that enables access to virtual applications and desktops on any device. George Watkins from Parallels joins us to discuss virtualization. Parallels has been in the virtualization space for nearly 25 years and has evolved its products to adapt to industry changes. They focus on simplifying virtual desktop infrastructure by offering a user-friendly and flexible solution. Parallels RAS integrates with cloud providers like Azure Virtual Desktop and offers cost optimization features. They are also investing in AI to improve user experience and productivity. Parallels is working towards unifying all their solutions under a single platform and is excited about the emerging trend of digital employee experiences (DEX) and the impact it will have on collaboration and productivity.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- Parallels RAS is a user-friendly and flexible virtualization solution that simplifies virtual desktop infrastructure.
- Parallels adapts to industry changes and integrates with cloud providers like Azure Virtual Desktop.
- They are investing in AI to improve user experience and productivity.
- Parallels is working towards unifying all their solutions under a single platform.
- The emerging trend of digital employee experiences (DEX) will have a significant impact on collaboration and productivity.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to Parallels and Parallels RAS
06:10 – Simplifying Virtual Desktop Infrastructure with Parallels RAS
09:44 – Adapting to Trends: Cloud Computing and Security Features
17:48 – The Power of AI in Parallels RAS
21:22 – Unifying Solutions: Parallels’ Strategy for a Single Platform
25:19 – The Impact of Digital Employee Experiences (DEX)
28:18 – The Future of the Industry: AI and DEX
32:47 – Conclusion and How to Learn More About Parallels
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:05)
Hello everyone and welcome to the SourceForge podcast. Thank you for joining us today. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton, Senior Editor and Multimedia Producer here at Slashdot and SourceForge, the world’s most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions. Today we’re talking with George Watkins, the Marketing Manager Professional at Parallels Remote Application Server or RAS for short. They offer an all-in-one remote working solution that enables access to virtual applications and desktops on any device, anytime, anywhere.
So to talk more about it, let me introduce George Watkins. George, welcome to the podcast.
George Watkins (00:42)
Thank you very much for having me. Yes, so my name is George. I’m a product marketing manager here at Parallels and I’ve been with the company for just over a year and a half now. And as you can tell by my accent, I’m based in the UK.
Beau Hamilton (00:55)
Lovely. Could you start by telling us more about the story of how Parallels got started and its journey so far?
George Watkins (01:02)
Yeah, no, absolutely. So, you know, Parallels has been around for 25 years. It started in 1999. And that was with our first flagship product, which is Parallels Desktop. And that is a on-device or endpoint virtualization solution. So if you have a Mac and you need to run Windows applications, then you basically create this virtualized Windows environment on your Mac.
And actually a lot of people know Parallels as a result of this. It’s a fantastic solution that’s being used all over the world with millions and millions of people. And really that was the start. But over the last 25 years, Parallels has certainly grown. We’ve kind of followed the industry trends. So where we, at that time we had a lot of decentralized IT infrastructure, IT managers working with individual desktops or laptops and they have to kind of add the applications, the data on there, the firewalls. It was obviously very, very kind of challenging to do and there’s a lot of business operations that were required. That obviously moved into more of a centralized IT infrastructure with the introduction of VDI.
And this is where we have Parallels RAS. So RAS is a virtual app and desktop solution for on-premise, at that time, and now obviously has grown to be cloud or support the cloud and access the cloud and also native as well. So we can do hybrid. So it’s just a really, really flexible solution.
But as the trends continued, we also have three other products. We have Parallels and Secure Workspace, which is really a web specific solution for virtual apps and desktops. It all runs through a HTML5 browser. So really, really flexible. You don’t need clients to support that. So any endpoint device, you can really access your applications and data grounded with zero trust principles. So it’s really really exciting product. And then as the trend has obviously continued to cloud computing, we also have two new products that came out earlier this year.
One which is Parallels DaaS. So it’s our Desktop-as-a-Service solution and kind of the little brother of Parallels RAS where we essentially manage it and it sits on Microsoft Azure and just gives a lot of flexibility and simplified management for any customer who uses it. And then finally a really exciting product which is our browser isolation solution which is called Parallels Browser Isolation. So really just ensuring that you know, the best possible security when accessing, you know, specific data and SaaS applications and through the browser, this just offers a really great extra layer of security.
And really Parallels, as I mentioned, has been a pioneer in this industry. And, you know, we have a fantastic range of solutions now that really allow us to help meet specific business requirements, whether it’s, you know, SMB, enterprise, and it really just means that we can meet those needs and overcome those business challenges while taking into account a business’s internal resources. Maybe they’re limited on skills, maybe they’re limited on staff, maybe they’re limited on budget. And these different solutions can really fit within those parameters to, as I mentioned, help overcome any type of business challenge.
Beau Hamilton (04:51)
Hmm. Well, thanks for walking us through that inception. It sounds like you have a lot of different solutions in the virtualization space. I want to focus on Parallels RAS, which according to my notes, it was first released in 2014. So about 10 years ago, and that was well before, well, not well before, but before the AI boom and, you know, in the, not infancy, I would say the middle years of the cloud space, cloud computing space. I’m curious what gaps in the virtualization market did Parallels aim to address with its products?
George Watkins (05:26)
Yeah, no, absolutely. So I think with Parallels RAS, you know, when I look at it specifically, and when I speak to the team, know, Parallels was really there to help overcome the “too” issue, which is a lot of these solutions, desktop and visualization solutions, they’re either too expensive, or they can be too complicated, or they can just be too inflexible. And we see that, you know, today and we saw it then and really when we address these things we address them in different ways.
So when we talk about it being too complex Well, there are as I mentioned some of these VDI environments that are very large very complex and haven’t really been designed in the most efficient way So as a result, know, whoever has to manage these environments tend to have to go on multi-day trainings, which never are cheap, they have to go through certifications and generally, there probably needs to be a little bit more of a team to support those environments.
Well, RAS kind of moves away from all that. It’s simplified by design. So there’s a lot of advanced features and design and R&D that’s gone into it to make it simplified in order to manage it more efficiently. So for example, we have wizard-based guides, and that’s across the initial setup and management of the RAS environment. So it’s really, really intuitive and it’s something that just a handful of IT managers only need to do in order to manage a very large infrastructure and environment.
And we’ve spoken to customers in the past about when we do migrate them over from their old solution to a Parallels RAS environment, we actually have to talk about potentially reducing service because they don’t need the large amount as well, they need as many servers in that old environment than they do now. So it’s really this whole idea of reduction. So really tries to address that complexity message and the importance of reducing that complexity.
You know, costs, Parallels RAS is a very simple license model, you know, we’re very transparent with it as well, so you can go on to parallels.com and they’ll tell you what the cost is for a license, not a lot of vendors do that, you have to go through quite a few different hoops in order to get that. So we’re very open about our cost and costing model. It’s one price and you have everything included. So when we talk about all the different features and functions where it’s going, you know, going in the coming months and years, all this is inclusive of that one cost. And, you know, there are other vendors out there that will maybe require a 200 plus baseline in order to, you know, license number in order to actually have that service and solution.
For us, it’s a minimum of 15. So it just means that we can really cater towards those SMBs as well as enterprise. So I think cost is a thing that we try to address because everyone has a fine amount of budget. And the last thing you want to be doing is spending a lot of that on licenses and not putting it elsewhere, for example, with people.
And then finally, think too inflexible. So we’ve been seeing this a lot over the last few years. So with a lot of companies having this transition to the cloud, the cloud really does provide huge amounts of benefits. The ability to scale resources, the ability to actually have access to the latest and greatest, GPUs, CPUs, storage. So there’s a real benefit to it and we see a lot of customers kind of transition and move to the cloud. Now, the problem is though, sometimes these companies, these customers, might not necessarily have the right strategy in place to move their whole environment from on-premise to the cloud. And that can be quite scary and maybe it can actually have some impact on their day-to-day operations. So what we have noticed is that there are vendors out there that will either give you a license cost for either on-prem or it will give you a cost for cloud or a hybrid approach. And when it’s hybrid, where you have this kind of choice of staying on-prem or move to the cloud or both, they tend to be a little bit more expensive as well.
So Parallels doesn’t do that, you know, you just have it all. So you can have multi-cloud support, you can have on-premise, you can have real flexibility. And we ensure that’s the case because of the work that the team do, you know, from that design level. We have huge amounts of integration from all the different endpoint devices that you choose and you require for your business needs, but you also have this huge amount of back-end infrastructure that we can connect to. And that also goes further with technologies like APD. And not only that, we have huge amounts of integration with that EUC ecosystem. So whether it’s monitoring tools or auditing tools, they can all be kind of connected to Parallels RAS. So the core, I guess, if I had to describe RAS in one word, it would be choice, but that choice is really through flexibility.
Beau Hamilton (10:52)
Okay, that makes sense. Along with the security aspects you mentioned and the trends you have to adapt to, what are some ways that you’ve adapted to the latest trends such as cloud computing and some of the security features? Could you elaborate on those features?
George Watkins (11:15)
Yeah, no, absolutely. So when it comes to introducing features, we typically have a roadmap and that’s really set in two specific ways. First, it’s going to be customer feedback. We’re very, very close with our customers and when they are in a need for a new feature because of their change in business strategy or a change in their circumstance, we can have those conversations with them and if it’s a particular feature that we can obviously implement, it’s something that is specific to RAS, or indeed we need additional integration, then we can put that on the roadmap and we can make them very, very happy. We joke internally that a relationship with a customer is a marriage with us because we just really do care about our customers.
But the other approach is really through long-range planning from a product and feature set. We have a very good engagement with the overall EUC community. So sharing ideas, sharing and understanding where those trends are heading, what our customers or future customers will actually need. And obviously that’s all based up with a lot of research. So these two approaches really help us really anticipate trends, but also kind of backfill additional areas of support for our existing customers.
So a good example is really around cloud integration. So over last few years, you know, cloud has been so important for a lot of customers out there, you know, this kind of transition into the cloud, full of that flexibility, you know, being able to access resources very, very quickly. But then at the same time, there’s always a few areas that need to be addressed and need to be honed in. So with Parallels RAS, it’s a single administration console, and everything is just done through that. So you don’t have to worry about multiple applications or multiple windows, is all done through them. And one of the things that we’ve done is a lot of integration around specific cloud providers. And I’m going to take one example, which is Azure Virtual Desktop. So where some providers have actually got their own dedicated control plane, we actually integrate with AVD. So that means that if anything comes, you know, GA from an AVD standpoint, you’ll be able to actually access that through the administration console on the Parallels RAS solution.
And some of the things that we’ve actually done to support AVD is cost optimizing, for example. So sometimes costs can run away when you’re actually using the cloud. There’s a lot of parameters, and particularly if you’re starting to think about it in a more larger scale if we’re thinking you know enterprise numbers so having the ability to have the solution help you manage those costs is a really important thing and, you know, for example with Parallels RAS we actually do that in several different ways, you know, we help from the likes of resource management, we have auto scaling, and we do things like storage scaling. So we’ve got a few different things that can actually help reduce those costs.
The other area that I think would be a good thing to highlight is also the kind of trend of AI acceleration. I was actually in a couple of Gartner events early in the year, and I think someone made the point of saying that people want AI, but they don’t know why they need it, and they don’t know how to implement it. And I think that’s a very powerful thing that was actually mentioned during the event. And I think when it comes to our roadmap and what we think when it comes to AI, we feel like it needs to really assist. We don’t want to put anything like that in our solution unless it’s really going to be a real and true advantage and benefit for our customers, for IT administrations, or indeed the users using parallels and accessing their applications through.
Beau Hamilton (15:32)
Well, I’m curious, can you talk a little bit more about the AI? I hate to beat a dead horse with this subject because it’s the talk of the town, you know, but I think that what you said is really interesting about the view on AI because it’s like so many companies are, it’s like an AI arms race. So many companies are throwing so much money at this new technology and you have like the big tech giants just trying to out compete each other. But at the same time they haven’t figured out a real use case or product that they can at least monetize and make money off of. So I imagine on maybe a little bit of a smaller scale, you guys are trying to kind of deal with that. You know, can you kind of talk more about that?
George Watkins (16:012)
Yeah, no, absolutely. So for example, we have, you know, one of my favorite features actually inside Parallels is the Session Pre-Launch. And this essentially allocates resources based on time, or we have this patent that deals with the system data for predictive availability. So it really basically tailors through this use of AI acceleration, the way the user patterns persist within the VM. So if I get up in the morning and I do, the first thing I do is I go onto Outlook or I might go onto Chrome. There might be certain trends that I do on a day-to-day basis. Well, Session Pre-Launch basically learns how I interact with my environment and what it’ll actually do is it will preempt some of these tools and applications and data that I typically need. So I’m not waiting around, you know, admittedly, you might be waiting around for a few seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds here when everything starts kind of warming up and you go into your normal day. But this Session Pre-Launch really kind of helps expedite that.
And it really comes down to productivity. And there was a fantastic quote that I’ve recently seen where it takes 20, is it 23 minutes? For a person who is initially distracted to then reconcentrate on the task at hand. So any type of these like little things that stop productivity, stop the concentration and impact that user experience can actually have a really big impact over time when you start thinking about the full workforce.
So, you know, things like these, these little tweaks, to help improve user experience, to help improve the overall workforce productivity is really, really key. And we are also working on things like predictive analytics, things like cost management, and even things like anomaly detection. I always struggle with that word. And all these are things that we believe are utilizing the AI capabilities in a very true sense. And it’s really there to help improve the administration day-to-day management and then just basically get better feedback on costing and get better feedback on resources and just generally saving time. And that’s really what we want to do to help improve that productivity and that workforce, you know, focus.
Beau Hamilton (18:55)
Okay. Yeah. So you have a lot in the pipeline. It sounds like that’s really interesting.
George Watkins (18:59)
Yeah, so the team are amazing. I do have to give my hats off to a lot of our engineering folks, basically all the teams that are actually making this product, you know, just the way it is. I feel like sometimes I have quite an easy job. I just have to tell people about how great this product is, but these guys are the ones that are really, you know, making it something and it’s fantastic the approach everyone’s taking.
Beau Hamilton (19:26)
Yeah, how do you, you know, I want to talk about the customer service because that’s obviously a really crucial element for businesses that plays a big role in overall success, especially with a software offering like you guys have. How does Parallels ensure that its system remains user friendly for organizations across different industries? And how do you take into consideration the feedback you receive?
George Watkins (19:50)
Well, I guess the bottom line is we listen. We do listen to our customers, partners, and also leading experts. As I mentioned, we have a very close relationship with the EUC community at large. And really, because we care about these partners and customers and that feedback, it really helps drive the direction that we take our product. As soon as we go into tech previews, we make sure that we get feedback from these different stakeholders and, you know, as a result of that feedback, you know, some of these solutions will, you know, go into GA into the next release or they might just be held back so we can make amends make changes until they’re know fit for purpose because of that feedback, you know, just really that point of improving and and accelerating.
And I think the key thing with RAS, Parallels RAS is the fact that it is so agnostic across different industries, you know, it is a core fundamental. I like to joke that it’s the you know it’s the it’s the base to build your house on. Because it’s so flexible, it’s constantly being updated and introducing more integrations, which means if you start, if a company starts with RAS on day one, in 10 years time, 20 years time, they can really still have that base. Even if the market changes and trends change, because we’re changing with it, it’s constantly evolving and to support those customers and to support those industry needs.
And as I mentioned, because it’s agnostic, the core fundamentals can be applied in so many different industries. And I think that’s a really key thing there is because we have to cater for so many people, this is why we try and simplify the way of using the infrastructure, using the solution. And that’s no mean feet. That’s a very difficult thing to do and that’s why we have all these fantastic capabilities and features inside the product because it helps with automation and it helps with alleviating the need of huge amounts of time dedicated to it to get it optimized in a way that most of these organizations want it to be optimized so they can maintain that level of productivity and business continuity.
Beau Hamilton (22:10)
Hmm. Now, are there any new developments or offerings from Parallels RAS that you’re particularly excited about? I know you mentioned a bunch of features already in regard to AI and machine learning algorithms, but do you have any top secret breaking news that you’d like to share with us in the podcast?
George Watkins (22:27)
Yeah, no, no, absolutely. I have obviously let slip about some of the specific features around AI that I’m kind of excited about. And to be fair, there is a huge amount of features and capabilities really kind of geared towards, you know, the different stakeholders in that type of environment, whether it’s the IT administrators, whether it’s the user. But I think there’s two things I would definitely like to address when it comes to why I’m getting excited about Parallels RAS in the next 6 months, 12 months.
And I think the first thing is the fact that we are working towards a strategy of unifying all our different solutions. So as I mentioned earlier on, we have Parallels RAS, but we also have Parallels Desktop. Everyone’s very familiar with that. We have our Parallels Workspace, and then we have our two new cloud native solutions, PBI, which is our browser isolation, and also our Parallels DAS, which is almost like the little brother of RAS. It’s very much managed virtual apps and desktop. But the idea is that we’re trying to, we’re working towards bringing all these into a unified platform.
So if the IT administrator chooses a particular path for a use case, so they’re trying to solve a particular use case, well, they can actually look at utilizing a number of these different solutions because it’ll all be part of the same portal. The administration portal will be very similar to them because it’s going to be very much covered across each of these products. And we have to, I have to tell this fantastic story. So we had one prospect a few weeks ago, our customer, and they were looking to support their, they had a few contractors, developer contractors who were going to be working on a 3D software tool. And the idea is that they were initially looking to use Parallels RAS in the cloud, particularly on AVD, so they can access the VGPU and then they could basically have a VM ready for these contractors. So as soon as they come on board, they fire off the login details and then they have access to the right tools, and the right applications and the customers themselves have a very good control over what is actually done on those environments. But when they started looking at the costs and even with all the great cost optimizations that Parallels brings to the cloud, it really wasn’t really at the right point from a TCO standpoint for that.
So what we ended up doing is suggesting another alternative, and that was actually using Parallels Desktop. And with this, we still have that same way of controlling the data, controlling the security, but it’s on-device. And essentially, what we ended up implementing is that when they actually had a new user, they would basically do the same thing. They give them the login details. They’ll download the Parallels Desktop on-device. But where they would have to use the GPU, VGPU in the cloud, they’re actually using the VGPU on-device. And many of these users, freelancers, actually had like a Mac, which will have GPU compute in there, as well as good memory, good CPU.
So that is the way we kind of overcome that. Because the TCO wasn’t really right there for a secure way of delivering GPU from the cloud, we then started to look, well, what about on-device? And that actually came up much better from a TCO standpoint, but still having that fantastic security and control with the applications and the data and the work those developers were doing on the application itself.
Beau Hamilton (26:23)
Interesting. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. That really makes me think about the importance of having that unified system and having something kind of familiar for the client to kind of jump back and forth between, right?
George Watkins (26:36)
Absolutely, and I think that’s the really great thing about the full kind of Parallels solutions is the fact that we have just different ways of overcoming a business need and a business requirement. And again, meeting those resource constraints as well, you know, whether it’s skills, you know, employee numbers, or indeed costs. So it’s a really nice way of balancing it out. And yes, so that’s something I’m very, very much looking forward to.
I think the other thing that I definitely have to mention is one of the things that Parallels RAS has a very close relationship with one of the other products out that suite, which is Parallels PBI. So PBI, as I mentioned before, is a cloud-native application. It essentially sits on top of RAS and can do the same, actually, for PSW and for DAS. And the idea is that it just enables much greater security on the browser device. Essentially what happens is that there’s this kind of gap, air gap between what is being accessed in the, on the web versus what is kind going into the actual corporate environment.
So this just really improves security just to another level. And a lot of my colleagues are really kind of doubling down on reinforcing the importance of Zero Trust principles and ensuring a Zero Trust mindset. And this is just a really great way of doing that is, you know, I saw this fantastic quote that I think it’s over 80% of all the cyber attacks that actually happen from a corporate standpoint, it’s all done through the browser, because people are just using it so much now, it’s the most productive tool you actually have on your arsenal. So, you know, making sure that we protect that is a really important thing. And certainly that’s one thing that we’ve been seeing is, we see a lot of bundling now with RAS and with PBI as a result because security is so paramount these days.
Beau Hamilton (28:42)
Yeah, no, I love that quote. That makes a lot of sense because I, I mean, most, vast majority of my time is spent on my, through my browser. So that definitely makes you think twice about where you visit, what kind of sites you interact with, and just security as a whole.
So we’re kind of nearing the end of my questions I have for you, but I wanted to take a step back and look at the industry as a whole before I let you go. I know you talked about the importance of Parallels RAS adapting to the latest trends. So if you could only pick one, what emerging trend do you believe will have the biggest impact on your industry in the next five years?
George Watkins (29:20)
Well, I think that’s an easy question, but I’m going to kind of answer it in two different ways. So first off, think AI definitely is going to be significantly important over the coming years. And in fact, well, forever, because it really does help and improve and accelerate in so many different ways. However, one thing I would like to double down on though is I think an area that is going to be really important is DEX, so Digital Employee Experiences.
We all see it firsthand in one way or another, and I think AI is really going to be helping that, especially the fact that we have things like considerations of mental health, making sure we have a work-life balance, having AI-assisted ways of tracking how we work, finding efficiencies, I think is going to be really important. But then on top of that I think DEX is going to be really helpful in the way that we work with one another. Because, you know, for example, me, I work from home, I have a very dispersed team all over the world, and actually having assisted AI with the tools that we use to communicate with one another, maybe one highlighting that, you know, such and such isn’t actually available right now because it’s out of time zone. And maybe I’ve had a long day and I forgot about it. But it’s the fact that it will help us better at our jobs and help us collaborate a lot more efficiently with those teams.
And I think what I really like about DEX is that there’s so much more of an emotional connection with this because when we talk about AI, sometimes it feels a little bit isolated and a little bit inhuman. But I think when we talk about DEX and the impact it has on those employee experiences, particularly when we talk about the digital workplace, I just think it has so much more relevance and gravity. So I do think this is going to be a big impact. I remember, now this is quite a few years ago now, but when I did my dissertation, one of the areas I used to talk about is the introduction of remote working. And this was, yeah, the early, I think about 2008, 2009. So that was obviously a very long time ago.
And it’s it’s just unbelievable to see that shift change. And I just think now we just need to be a lot smarter about how we collaborate and work together and actually having this AI systems and also the different types of software that is actually now coming out to support larger organizations and connecting us in a much more intimate way. It’s going to be a huge impact on people’s day to day work.
Beau Hamilton (32:06)
Hmm. Well, I love that answer. I think that that makes me think a lot about it because I’ve been working remote for years now, even well before the COVID pandemic, you know, and so thinking about the current buzz around artificial intelligence and how you’re absolutely right about how it’s, it does seem kind of isolating. And so kind of, you know, looking at the more optimistic side of how it allows us to connect with each other and the DEX support, I think that’s really kind of an optimistic approach and…but also not, you know, a realistic approach as well. I think, I think that certainly is gonna…
George Watkins (32:45)
Oh, absolutely and there’s plenty of research out there as well to show when teams are more engaged they tend to be more profitable and it was a quote that actually used in a presentation a few weeks ago where they mentioned that 23%, when employees are engaged and active you can actually see a 23% profit, they’re more profitable by 23% as a result of that engagement.
And I feel like that has a real connection to how we engage. And it really comes back to the idea of DEX and making sure that we have the right tools and also how to use those tools. And again, AI systems is going to be certainly there to help, yeah.
Beau Hamilton (33:28)
I love that. So more productive and having a better work-life balance. It’s a win-win.
George Watkins (33:33)
That’s what I think, absolutely.
Beau Hamilton (33:36)
Awesome, well, my last question, where can people learn more about Parallels and its products and get in touch with you?
George Watkins (33:43)
Yeah, absolutely at parallels.com. Come check us out. It’s really easy to understand more about and learn about our solutions. We have some nice fat buttons on there to contact us. We have a fantastic team who will reach out to know our solutions very, very well. And obviously, you know, want to know about your circumstances and if there are ways that we can, you know, come together to support you and help you achieve your business goals. So yeah, check out parallels.com.
Beau Hamilton (34:13)
Awesome. parallels.com. All right. Well, thank you so much, George. This has been a great conversation, and I appreciate you taking the time to sit down and talk with us.
George Watkins (34:21)
Yeah, no problem. Thank you so much.
Beau Hamilton (34:23)
Well, thank you all for listening to the Slashdot Media podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software-related podcasts. I’ll talk to you the next one.