Overview

ARCEN Engenharia, S.A. is a Portugal-based industrial engineering company that designs, manufactures, and installs equipment and complete plant solutions for the construction and heavy industry sectors. Its work spans concrete batching plants, asphalt mixing plants, aggregates processing systems, and industrial automation solutions for B2B customers worldwide.

With a predominantly on-premises IT strategy, ARCEN needed a reliable alternative to Citrix that could support business-critical engineering and manufacturing workflows without disrupting day-to-day operations. The company required a solution capable of simplifying management, scaling with its infrastructure, and securely supporting critical tools, software, and information inside its own network. After an extended proof-of-concept, the company selected Parallels RAS.

The challenge

ARCEN relies on a custom-built ERP system tailored to its business operations. Because the software is custom-developed, application maintenance does not follow a standard packaged deployment model. Instead, the IT team often needs to update or replace DLLs while the system is actively in production. At the same time, the company needed a secure way to provide remote access to applications and virtual desktops without exposing information outside its network.

The company narrowed its requirements to three core priorities:

  • Simplified deployment and administration
  • Scalability
  • Secure access to business-critical systems

Compatibility was equally important. ARCEN needed confidence that legacy ERP components inside their environment would continue to run properly in a virtualized environment.

Why Parallels RAS

ARCEN first discovered Parallels RAS through an online event and began evaluating it as a potential replacement for its existing Citrix environment. As testing progressed, the company found Parallels RAS easier to deploy and maintain while still supporting the technical requirements of its environment. Ease of maintenance became one of the key factors in the final decision, particularly within a complex infrastructure supporting engineering, ERP, and manufacturing-related workloads. The quality of the support experience also played a significant role in the decision.

According to the company, the technical support, customer service, and sales engineering teams consistently demonstrated strong technical expertise exceptional, delivering a consistently high level of expertise and responsiveness throughout the evaluation process.

The proof of concept

ARCEN took a cautious and methodical approach to testing. The proof of concept extended across several months due to day-to-day operational demands and a broader datacenter modernization initiative taking place at the same time.

As part of the project, the company transitioned from HP infrastructure to Lenovo hardware, migrated from VMware to Nutanix, replaced Citrix with Parallels RAS, introduced GPU-enabled virtualization nodes, upgraded internal datacenter networking to 25 Gb/s with redundancy up to 50 Gb/s, and implemented a new backup environment.

Once testing and infrastructure upgrades were complete, the actual deployment of Parallels RAS took roughly two weeks.

During the evaluation, the team tested a range of real-world applications and workflows, including:

  • ELO (ERP)
  • Primavera
  • SolidWorks on VDI with GPU
  • Software used to access and configure CNC machinery

Rather than validating isolated applications, the evaluation centered on whether employees could reliably carry out day-to-day engineering, ERP, and manufacturing tasks inside a virtualized environment. including:

  • Device compatibility
  • Printer compatibility
  • USB equipment mapping, including USB-to-serial converters
  • Virtual desktop performance with GPU
  • Roaming profiles
  • Support for ERP components built with legacy programming languages

The solution

Today, ARCEN uses Parallels RAS as part of its day-to-day IT operations to keep applications up to date, add servers, and deploy new software across its environment. The platform runs alongside Nutanix, which the company uses for hardware and storage virtualization. Parallels RAS provides a centralized way to deliver applications and virtual desktop while allowing ARCEN to maintain full control over its on-premises infrastructure.

Two capabilities stand out as especially valuable: device redirection and printing device compatibility. These are critical in an environment that depends on specialized engineering software, connected peripherals, and uninterrupted manufacturing workflows. The successful validation of USB mapping, printer support, CNC-related software access, and GPU-enabled virtual desktops during testing helped confirm that the environment could support ARCEN’s operational requirements without requiring major workflow changes.

During production use, the team identified some inconsistencies related to multi-monitor session behavior in certain dual-screen and multi-display configurations. ARCEN plans to evaluate these further as part of a future platform upgrade.

The results

Since adopting Parallels RAS, ARCEN reports improvements across several areas compared to their previous Citrix environment, including:

  • Lower overall costs
  • Reduced infrastructure requirements
  • Simpler licensing and administration
  • Easier day-to-day management

The company also benefited from a more streamlined deployment and management experience, reducing operational overhead while continuing to support complex engineering and manufacturing workloads.

A collaborative delivery approach

ARCEN’s IT environment is managed by Megauser IT Consulting, Lda., which operates as the company’s outsourced IT department. For the Parallels RAS project, Megauser engaged Parallels distributor ADMTOOLS, which handled both the solution delivery and implementation services. ADMTOOLS managed the migration and deployment end-to-end, helping validate key technical requirements and ensure a smooth transition into production. The implementation process was led closely by the deployment team, helping streamline migration activities across multiple infrastructure changes occurring simultaneously within the datacenter environment. Megauser continues to oversee day-to-day IT operations and ongoing alignment with business needs.

“Parallels RAS stands out for its simplicity and ease of use. From deployment to day-to-day management, it provides a much more straightforward and efficient experience compared to other solutions we’ve worked with.”

Raul Coelho
Chief Executive Officer, Megauser IT Consulting, Lda.

Conclusion

For ARCEN, Parallels RAS provided a reliable alternative to Citrix that aligned with the company’s on-premises strategy, custom ERP environment, and need for secure virtual application and desktop delivery. After a thorough proof of concept, Parallels RAS demonstrated that it could support those requirements within ARCEN’s existing on-premises infrastructure while simplifying administration and reducing infrastructure overhead.

The result is an environment better suited to the company’s engineering and industrial workflows while keeping administration streamlined and infrastructure demands under control.

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