EUGENIO FERRANTE, PARALLELS
EUGENIO FERRANTE GENERAL MANAGER, PARALLELS CROSS-PLATFORM APPLICATIONS, ASIA PACIFIC
What do you use Parallels for yourself?
I mostly use it for Excel. I’ve spent a lot of hours in front of Excel, and I’m so familiar with everything that comes with the full Windows version of Excel that even though there is a version available on Mac OS X, I’m not going to settle for that. If you’re used to working with the Windows version of Excel, or any other Office application, it’s going to be hard for you to make the transition to Mac OS X. I could see myself doing a lot of word on Word or Outlook for Mac, but Excel is really different.
More people are certainly using Macs today than ever before, and they’re bringing their Macs into the office.
There are many companies that develop a lot of apps specifically for Windows, that spend a lot of their IT budget for those applications, and they’re not going to rewrite the apps for Mac OS.
Today, people are coming in with Macs, iPads, even Chromebooks to work. It’s not like five years ago, where most of your employees were running Windows. People are bringing their own devices, and very often [those devices] aren’t running Windows, so companies need to provide them with a better way to work.
IT managers can’t dictate the way people work anymore; they need to find a solution. Some people use more than one machine, their own and the office’s. But if you think of the concept of two machines – one where you only do a couple of things, and your own machine where you do 98% of the things in your day, it’s such a waste. An IT manager could, for less than the cost of a machine, get a solution for you to do everything on your own. So Parallels would be good for the company and it would be good for you.
And it’s happening. We were a consumer product only until three years ago. And it was because Apple was selling mostly to consumers. In the last two years, our offering to businesses has grown much faster than the rest of our business. People are now bringing their Macs to work and wanting it to become their work devices. Tablets are even bigger. People are bringing their tablets to work and they can do basic work on them. With Parallels, companies can now give them a way to continue working on Windows applications without having to give them a company issued laptop. It saves money on both sides.
Why use Parallels since Macs can use Boot Camp to boot into Windows?
You can do Boot Camp. It really depends on what your work is like, if you do everything on your Mac, then once a week you have to fill in your timesheet and that’s the only time you need to use Windows, you can take the five minutes it takes to reboot into the two systems. And it’s no big deal. But if it’s a number of apps that you use every day on both sides, then those few minutes start adding up quickly. At the end of the day, it’s about convenience. Another thing is that if you’re running Boot Camp, you’re partitioning your computer into two and wasting resources at a certain point.
Tablets have grown to take over the market. How has that impacted Parallels?
It has definitely affected Parallels in one way: We thought of ourselves as a way for you to work across certain boundaries, in that case it was the laptop or PC. We took this same concept to mobile devices and came up with the new app called Parallels Access, which allows you to run the apps that you have on your desktop from your tablet.
Let’s talk about Excel again, I can come here and launch Excel using my iPad. It runs on my remote computer that I’m going to connect to, and it’s full Excel. It’s not a scaled-down version of Excel and everything that I have on my remote machine; I can run it on my iPad and also on my Android device. If you have a tablet, and you want to run from that tablet any application you have on your remote machine, you can do it with Parallels Access.