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Very good product - poor sales and renewal experience
August 22, 2023

Very good product - poor sales and renewal experience

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Parallels Remote Application Server (Parallels RAS)

We use it to host our in house developed primary LoB applications as remote apps for our users. This allows us to centrally manage and control access, configurations, and usage of these applications. Parallels RAS has really developed over the 7-8 years I have been using it across several versions and a couple of re-deployments/migrations. It is a solid product for our needs.
  • Ease of application publishing
  • Secure remote gateway and integrations
  • Robust and redundancy can be built in
  • Wide range of platform support and use cases
  • Product support has been good when needed
  • Licensing, our perpetual license was forcefully removed from us after 8 years without warning, causing a doubling of the price, after providing a signed sales quote for renewal through our VAR. Parallels sales team did not seem to care, and was willing to throw away a customer who used their services for nearly a decade, and throw our VAR under the bus.
  • continued addition of new features for existing platforms, not just a focus on the hot new cloud offerings.
  • reduced infrastructure costs
  • positive ROI until recent perpetual license termination
  • Ease of management
There is a fairly robust set of instructions and guides available for each version that is released. They publish thorough release/change notes to ensure you know exactly how a change/update may impact your configuration. There are tools built in for use with certain types of automation workflows as well.
initial setup was 8+ years ago by a different person and the underlying technology as well as the product has come a very long way since. I did build out a migration environment a few years ago and it was very pleasant and easy to do a side by side deployment and then tear down of the old infrastructure of the course of less than a month in a 200 user single admin environment but this is somewhat aided by my existing familiarity with the product. The setup of brand new wouldn't be too difficult in our implementation, the more time consuming thing would be the testing of one's setup to ensure you have it set up to do what you need, but tweaking along the way is also fairly easy.
I have used but not admined similar products from VMware and seen demos from Cisco and I would not personally find any benefit in migrating away from our Parallels configuration to those platforms.

Do you think Parallels Remote Application Server (Parallels RAS) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Parallels Remote Application Server (Parallels RAS)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Parallels Remote Application Server (Parallels RAS) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Parallels Remote Application Server (Parallels RAS) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Parallels Remote Application Server (Parallels RAS) again?

Yes

Parallels RAS can be used in many scenarios, It can be a VDI platform for desktop replacement and a move to a more central virtualized infrastructure. It can allow you to publish a cloud app that can be accessed from anywhere on nearly any device avoiding the need to install anything on device. I can see its value in Retail, Remote services, Manufacturing, schools, etc. anywhere with an internet connection. It adds a secure layer in front of RDP services. It can be used to allow secure access to desktops or laptops from outside the office if this is something you need to do.