Parsec’s 2021 In Review

2021 has been one heck of a year at Parsec. We released tons of features, launched partnerships, improved performance, and grew our team faster than ever before. While perusing our changelog, it felt like a good time to take a step back and have a look at all the things we’ve accomplished this year.

So, if you’ll forgive a little self-reflection, let’s jump into it.

Parsec for Teams…for Enterprise…

A big theme of our product development this year was ensuring Parsec for Teams was able to be used and deployed across large enterprises. We started the year strong with the launch of Team Computers, finally allowing admins to provision computers so they would only be available to people in their organization. A massive number of customers adopted Team Computers within days of the product’s launch, and it’s now the dominant way most teams interact with their hardware.

After that, we jumped into launching Parsec for Enterprise. When it came to Enterprise, we wanted to solve for a few key needs we had heard from customers trying out Parsec: increased control, security, visibility, and automation. Here’s what we released:

Role-Based Access (RBAC): We added the ability for customers to create their own admin roles, allowing for significantly more granular permissions. Enterprise teams can create roles specific to groups of team members, customize what controls they have access to, and successfully translate their organization’s structure to Parsec.

Audit Logs: Visibility into connection and usage history is integral from a security standpoint. Team admins with the right permissions can download seven days of audit logs; Enterprise admins can access the full connection history via the Parsec for Teams API (which we’ll get into in just a sec).

The Teams API: We created the Parsec for Teams API so that large organizations could automate core team functions. Using the API, you can invite and manage Team Members, provision Team Computers, and even create custom Guest Access invitations. It gives organizations the ability to plug Parsec into existing tools and processes.

High-Performance Relay: This one’s pretty cool: we built a relay that allows system administrators to route all traffic through an on-premise server. This gives you significantly more control over traffic, and can have a big impact on performance.

All of these things make for a pretty compelling Enterprise product. Parsec has been home to gamers, freelancers, small companies, studios, and more for years and years. Bringing that same power into incredibly diverse, complex enterprise conditions has allowed people around the world to comfortably work together from anywhere.

Same Parsec performance, even better quality

Since Parsec’s inception, we’ve been battling one key interactive streaming challenge: latency. In our opinion (and in the opinion of millions of gamers around the world), latency and lag are the biggest hindrances to a good time. Dropped frames and slowed inputs make fast moving games basically impossible to play. We’d take a smooth experience over crystal clear images most days.

But in 2021, Parsec’s customer base transformed. For the video editors, animators, engineers, and artists using Parsec, latency still reigns supreme, but image and text quality is of much, much greater performance.

So our ever-inspiring native engineering team set about creating a massive upgrade to how we handle variable network conditions, which resulted in crystal-clear images.

We think with the congestion overhaul, Parsec is as-close-as-it-gets to actually using a computer in-person. And our partners at Digital Foundry agreed. Just check it out below.

Parsec, a Unity Company

In case you missed it, in September we were acquired by Unity. You can read all about it right here.

Unity shares our mission to empower creators to work where, when, and how they want. We believe that real-time 3D experiences will transform the world for many, many years to come.

By joining the Unity family, Parsec now has many, many more resources to build a world-class team (we’re hiring, by the way), support a rapidly growing community of customers, and continue to build the most performant remote access technology on the planet. The first few months have been fantastic, and we’ll be thrilled to tell you more about how Parsec and Unity are coming together in the years to come.

And that’s not all…

No blog post is long enough to give adequate space to all the features, partnerships, and growth we’ve experienced this year. So here’s a big set of bullets running through a bit more of what we’ve accomplished:

• Parsec can be installed using shared installation on Windows

• Experimental hosting for MacOS went live

• Parsec now powers the Plex Arcade

• Launched triple monitor streaming and made improvements to 4:4:4 color mode

• A Parsec-configured AMI is available in the AWS marketplace

• Tribeca Film Festival used Parsec to bring demos to thousands of players around the world

• Crushed innumerable pesky, frightful bugs and banished them from existence

• Group-specific settings for Parsec for Teams, allowing Group admins to customize and control permissions for specific team members

• There are now more than 60 people working full-time on Parsec, as we built our sales, marketing, product, design, and engineering teams

• Much, much more…

So this is the New Year

We have plenty more in store for next year. From accessibility and platform expansion, to even more enterprise features and continuing to improve our performance, we’ve got a major roadmap that sets Parsec up to grow even faster.

From everyone here on the Parsec team, a huge, triumphant, cacophonous thank you for your support. We wouldn’t be where we are without our incredible community. Whether you’re navigating a move to distributed, hybrid work, building the next great game far away from your computer, or bonding over games with family and friends, you’re a part of Parsec.

Thanks for being here, thanks for reading, and thanks for trusting Parsec. Until 2022.

The Parsec Team