Tackling Event Production with Windows Software on Mac

It’s a tradition for people in the music industry to be ardent Apple® devotees, and this is also true for event production. Many Mac® devices are involved wherever creative minds gather to design, plan, and realize major events. POOLgroup—a leading event production company based in Emsdetten in the Westphalia area of Germany—is one of those places. Here, a staff of 150 has managed more than 30,000 large events. The company’s portfolio includes big shows as well as major events for politics, industry, and entertainment.

The corporate IT team is responsible for 200 Apple client devices. 60 of those form a rent-out pool for customers and their events. The remaining 140 or so Mac devices are used for office work, planning, and organizing. In this exacting environment, software presents a challenge. Apart from Adobe Creative Suite and Apple applications such as iWork and Final Cut Pro, POOLgroup also uses software made for Windows. The company’s CRM system is a Windows-only application and so are various Excel solutions. For organizations equipped exclusively with Apple hardware, this is a typical challenge. In such cases, adding Windows systems for administrative purposes usually isn’t a satisfactory solution. Employees are used to Apple devices and are usually less than happy to work with both systems in tandem. There’s also the additional purchase and support costs.

The Apple solution for this, Boot Camp®, allows users to install Windows as a secondary system next to macOS®. However, this wasn’t an option for POOLgroup’s IT team. Boot Camp requires staff members to reboot their computers frequently, which takes time and is not a convenient way of working.

The solution that the event company went for was Parallels Desktop® for Mac Business Edition. Parallels Desktop Business Edition allows the office workers to continue to only use their familiar Mac devices (along with the cherished macOS operating system) and simply run Windows applications with the help of Parallels Desktop.

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