Global Informatica Offers Outstanding Customer Experience Thanks to the Power of Parallels RAS

Global Informatica:

Logo courtesy of Global Informatica

“With Parallels RAS, we are able to deliver six different versions of our software instantly to more than 300 users. The customer experience has improved significantly, with quick access to applications anywhere, anytime.” – Paolo Moleri, Marketing & Sales Director at Global Informatica

Company Overview

Global Informatica Srl, an independent software vendor (ISV), uses Parallels RAS to deliver its applications efficiently to more than 300 users from more than 30 customers. The flexibility, ease of use, and low-cost licensing of Parallels RAS helped the company grow as an ISV.

Founded in 1996, Global Informatica is a leading independent service provider in Italy. The company is a result of the synergistic collaboration of a primary core of consultants highly skilled in the field of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT). Within a few years, the company grew in leaps and bounds.

Global Informatica works closely with its customers to identify their business needs, and aligns them with the right IT procedures. With years of experience supporting businesses and professional firms operating in different sectors, Global Informatica delivers tailored IT solutions to businesses of all sizes. The company serves the following verticals, with the relevant applications indicated in brackets:

International Freight Forwarders (SPED APP)

Logistics (LOGIS APP)

Petroleum Sector (PETROIL APP – HEAT SERVICES APP)

Business Software (BUSINESS APP – ROAD APP)

Global Informatica buys the best technology and the best solutions on the market and augments them with its expertise and experience, in order to deliver customized business solutions to its customers.

The Challenge

The main challenge for Global Informatica was to deliver applications to customers who work on diversified platforms. While some customers use a Windows desktop environment, others work on Mac and Linux. Moreover, customers use a range of mobile devices to access various applications, adding to this complexity.

The company was looking for a solution to publish its applications centrally and provide access to customers. At the same time, it was important to provide visibility in order to monitor and manage the entire infrastructure easily.

One option was to develop applications that are compatible with any device. However, this would be a time-consuming process and would not guarantee support for all devices in a BYOD environment.

The alternative was to virtualize applications and publish them across all customer sites. With virtualization, OS personalization and testing of specific hardware are not needed. However, virtualization has its challenges, a few of which are server response time, use of local printers, and data security. As Global Informatica delivers services to customers that operate in verticals such as freight and logistics, it is important for them to provide quick access to corporate resources from anywhere, at any time.

The Solution

Global Informatica has relied on Parallels RAS since 2006. Its flexibility, ease of use, and competitive price encouraged the company to implement it to support its growth as an ISV.

Global Informatica’s infrastructure comprises 10 servers, running RDS or a hypervisor (Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware EXI). The company uses Parallels RAS for application publishing along with server load balancing and high availability load balancing (HALB) for the gateways.

Global Informatica publishes the following applications:

SPED APP is an application suite for management of freight via land, air and sea, compliant with IATA standards. With Sped App, traceability and positioning of shipments becomes easy.

PETROIL APP Suite is tailor-made for management and marketing of petroleum products. It handles the management of inventory and warehousing/storage for all products marketed.

The BUSINESS APP manages the flow of documents required in the sales process.

LOGIS APP handles the product delivery system.

Using Parallels RAS, the company has been able to publish all applications centrally, and deliver them easily to its customers. Moreover, RAS supports a wide range of mobile devices, providing an outstanding end user experience. Server and gateway load balancing along with printing and scanning redirection are added advantages.

Key Benefits

Global Informatica has concluded that Parallels RAS is an affordable, cost-effective, and secure solution. Its simple configuration and ease of use make Parallels RAS a perfect choice for ISVs. Licensing is affordable – very different from the expensive licensing costs associated with products such as Citrix Virtual Apps (formerly Citrix XenApp) or VMware Horizon – so Global Informatica started profiting very quickly from its purchase. The support and service provided by Parallels has been remarkable.