Has anyone done a good comparison between Parallels and Citrix? We're not moving from Citrix, but the distributor who we go through for licensing has told senior management they can save $$$'s if we move, which has some senior management people excited. I would like to extinguish this conversation so it doesn't waste too much time and take our focus off our current tasks.

lol the usual $#^% thrown around by sales people. Parallels is great, a fantastic product in the right situations - this isn't a comparison, but an intro into what I found cool about them https://jkindon.com/what-in-the-ras/ I am sure Citrix likely has some competitive info available - protocol alone is a game changer

James nailed it. It's the protocol that keeps people on Citrix. If you have remote workers over less than perfect bandwidth, you will notice the difference. And in the long run that costs more money in worker slow down then you pay in Citrix licensing.

Parallells emailed me one of their "come to the dark side we have cookies" marketing emails.. saying move to us, we're cheaper and just as good. I'm with James on this... Nothing is optimized for less than ideal internet connections as well as Citrix. If you know of something please share, cuz I love learning new things.

[Disclaimer: I work for Parallels]. Hey Jeremy, James' article is really good. a great balanced summary of the scenario for sure. To add to that, I'd say the conversation is 2 things. 1. it's all about the use case 2. it's about how your company is being treated a bit more on each one. 1: yes, Parallels RAS uses RDP. it adds optimisations but it's there. AVD uses RDP too (RAS works with AVD just nicely BTW). The question an organistation needs to ask themselves is "do I need HDX or is an alternative OK for me" - if so Parallels RAS can genuinely save a lot of money compared to a typical Citrix renewal - I see it every week. If a customer NEEDS HDX and is happy to take the commercial decision to keep it then, that's what they need to do. But just bear in mind the next renewal will need to be paid "no matter what" - But that is just one aspect. RAS is a single license which includes a whole bunch of things: MFA, Load Balancing, multi-cloud, dynamic printing, themes-based access, multi-tenancy, access to published local apps and physical desktops, unlimited reporting - and a whole load more. All from a single console. You should not base a decision based on the protocol alone. Try it out & see what you think - 🙂 2. Some customers have been treated badly by Citrix from a relationship perspective. This has left many senior managers to state they are going to move away from Citrix "no matter what the cost" - not just to Parallels RAS but to other solutions too. Citrix do seem to be altering their stance to reduce this issue moving forwards, but I hear this kind of statement often. Therefore I would say, actually walk it through. Work out what is a must have. Plan for a scenario where the current vendor needs to be replaced (from a strategy perspective this should be for all vendors - you should always have a plan B) and work out how that would be done. And at what cost. I would definitely try and avoid a conversation where your starting position is "we want to keep this technology - how do we do it" It should be "we want to do the best thing for our company - is that going to be the same decision we have made in the past, or does it need to change" To add. a little to what your assumptions are Devin - there are a number of optimisations for variable bandwidth. RAS has policy settings to auto-detect network quality and adjust the performance options based on that. So, I'd say try it out & make your own mind up.

Chris I really appreciate your reply here 🙂 I have clients that I work with who use Parallels and it works wonderfully for them. I definitely wouldn't count out Parallels as a solution at all. You're totally right about there being optimizations for performance, and this is present in most (perhaps all) solutions like Citrix, Parallels, RDP, AVD etc. Your bottom line is perfect. There is no one size fits all... Take a fresh look at your technology stack as often as you can

With Omnissa's lack of info and updates on their product, I am recommending Parallels over Horizon. Parallels should jump on those clients as well as there is no HDX to compete against.

@Jeff Riechers Omnissas lack of info on their product? They have been very open about their product and what it's doing over here? Maybe we need to loop you in with some Omnissa folks (both solutions are owned by the same folks by the way....KKR)

So a general question. Where are people seeing bad Internet speeds still?

Plenty of scenarios - remote and upcoming mine sites, geological mapping/discovery of next gen sites, ships and associated sea based vessels, outback and remote locations tied to wireless/4G/5G (new tech making this better of course), locations subjected to narky weather (flooding etc) where infrastructure is still copper. Even on newer gen connections, speed/latency/jitter can be variable - RDP is pretty strong on a decent connection, but typically weaker on variable connections in my experience

It’s like I say. All about the use case. For most people in most industries connection speed and performance these days is great. Certainly compared to 10 years ago. And maybe it’s occasionally completely off (one of the impacts of working from home on a personal connection). We have solutions for the ‘off’ scenario. Keep watching this space for how that pans out, Variable bandwidth is much less common than it was but still there in some scenarios and will persist in some industries. A business needs to understand their own use case before looking for a solution to it. Hopefully we all agree there 🙂