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Parallels: Retaining and Growing Critical Partner/Customer Relationship with Tyler Technologies

Situation

Following Parallels’ acquisition of a VDI and application publishing company, I spearheaded the development of a new Parallels Service Provider Program (PSP) to expand our ISV client footprint and drive significant growth. Tyler Technologies, one of our largest ISV clients, relied on Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) for their hosting offering to state, local, and education (SLED) customers. However, a major outage disrupted their operations. Prior to the acquisition, the product’s support structure was inadequate for enterprise clients, prompting Tyler’s CIO to consider reverting to Citrix instead of renewing their contract or joining the PSP program.

Tasks

Recognizing the risk of losing a critical client, I prioritized demonstrating Parallels’ commitment to superior support, development, quality assurance, and communication. With the CIO directly involved, urgency was paramount. My plan included:
My responsibilities included:
  • Communicating the outage situation transparently.
  • Assembling a dedicated response team.
  • Coordinating stakeholders for a unified response.
  • Executing the resolution plan with urgency.
  • Delivering a postmortem and long-term improvement plan.

Actions

To address the crisis and rebuild trust, I took the following steps with significant urgency.
Key actions included:
  • Executive Engagement: Immediately briefed Parallels’ C-level executives, ensuring they were prepared to provide internal support or engage directly with the client.
  • Team Assembly: Formed a cross-functional response team, including the SE Director, Support Director, and Lead Dev Director, with escalation paths to our CIO and CTO for rapid decision-making.
  • Client Coordination: Collaborated with Tyler Technologies to develop and execute a resolution plan, establishing regular communication through hourly, daily, and weekly checkpoint calls, even when progress was limited.
  • Escalation Management: Facilitated global coordination to prioritize and accelerate the response, ensuring alignment across time zones.
  • Post-Incident Follow-Up: Authored a comprehensive postmortem report for Tyler’s CIO, outlining the outage’s cause and resolution. Developed an improvement plan to prevent recurrence, working with internal teams to enhance processes.
  • Process Enhancement: Used insights from the incident to refine Parallels’ support framework, particularly for the PSP program.

Results

By acting decisively and fostering open communication, I transformed a critical outage into an opportunity to strengthen Parallels’ partnership with Tyler Technologies. My ability to coordinate cross-functional teams, engage senior leadership, and deliver a client-focused resolution not only retained a key ISV but also drove program improvements that enhanced Parallels’ enterprise support capabilities and fueled growth.
The swift response yielded significant outcomes:
  • Restored access for Tyler’s affected clients within approximately 6 hours, with full environment stability achieved within 2 weeks.
  • Leveraged the incident to create a premium support tier for PSP partners, enhancing customer satisfaction and generating additional revenue.
  • Built strong relationships with Tyler’s team, from support staff to the CIO and VP of Hosting Operations, preventing their departure to Citrix and led to joining the new PSP program.
  • The trust led to support from the CIO and CTO to expand Parallels usage to other product lines, increasing license usage 40%.