Teradici has supported Macs on their PCoIP for years, but support for their Cloud Access Software remote management solution is new, and will be available by the middle of the year.
Vancouver-based Teradici is best known as the creator and provider of the PCoIP [PC over IP] protocol. But they also make Cloud Access Software, which enables remote support for virtual workstations, for power users as well as for knowledge workers. Now they are announcing that they will be extending Cloud Access Software to support Macs for the first time, so customers can remotely access their Macs as if they were on a local machine. Mac support is scheduled to be available in mid-2021.
“This fits in well with our strategy of providing ultimate flexibility for our remote access users.,” said Ziad Lammam, Vice President, Product Management and Marketing at Teradici. “With the pandemic, this included expanding support to physical workstations, because people were stuck having to access them from home. This is much bigger, however. We have always had interest in the MacOS as well as Windows and Linux, and demand is even greater now because it’s harder to take some of these physical Macs home. Some of those are quite big. We have been working behind the scenes to add this to our roadmap, and now we are announcing we are bringing MacOS support to our Cloud Access software by the middle of this year.”
Teradici support for Macs is not new at all – but it is on Cloud Access Software.
“We have supported the MacOS on our PCoIP for many years now, but that’s just supporting an endpoint,” Lammam said. “What we are doing now involves supporting the MacOS agent – not just the client technology, but the host-side technology to connect to a MacOS.” Both the Catalina macOS and new BigSur macOS will be supported.”
Lammam said that the complexity of providing this full support for Macs accounts for the delay between the announcement and availability.
“The challenge is partly in the porting, but the bigger one is that Mac has a unique hardware architecture,” he said. “The drivers are different and the GPUs may be different. We are extending our software solution to take advantage of the platform. Apple has a very unique platform, so there is considerable work at extending support for that.”
Lammam said that this extension of support to Macs on Cloud Access Software is happening during the pandemic, but that it wasn’t really caused by it.
“Pre-COVID, we already had customer demands for remote access for Macs, so it’s not really a COVID-driven use case,” he noted. “What COVID did do was accelerate it.”
Both on-premises data centre and public cloud environments will be supported. In addition, all existing PCoIP endpoints including macOS clients, Windows clients, Linux clients, PCoIP Zero Clients and PCoIP thin clients will be able to connect to a macOS host.
“This is a unique offering,” Lammam emphasized. “There are no other high performance remote solutions out there for the MacOS, which can support high performance use.”
“The expectation is that initially it will be consumed by content creators – people who work at large studios producing content and doing things like VFX design and video editing,” Lammam said. “Before, they had to do remote editing on a non-MacOS.”
Lammam said this announcement is welcome news for Teradici channel partners.
“Our partners are all very positive about this,” he indicated. “Their end customers have been asking for this too. It fills a gap that has been outstanding for many years. Macs are a fairly high percentage of devices in some companies, and it’s not unusual to have 30% of endpoints being Macs in some use cases. Partners need to be able to accommodate that.”
