In the early hours of last Tuesday morning, shortly before the opening keynote of Citrix Synergy 2018, we experienced a magnitude 4.5 earthquake along the San Andreas fault zone – rattling swathes of Southern California, from San Diego to Santa Clarita.

Taking to the stage later that morning, Citrix CEO David Henshall outlined his company’s new theory of ‘people-centric computing’ – essentially an aim to provide a dramatically better user experience – and experts believe the vendor might now have what it takes to send some seismic waves of its own through the industry.

«For the first time in a while, the company has all the strategic, product, and organisational building blocks in place to execute in the marketplace,» Andrew Hewitt, Forrester’s analyst for infrastructure and operations, told Cloud Pro. «Today’s leading organisations are constantly looking for a way to simplify and improve employee experience with technology, and Citrix is well-positioned to do that.»

The overarching message the company was keen to push was its vision of the ‘future of work’. This, at first glance, seems an impressive statement, but for the fact that all its flagship rollouts at Citrix Synergy had existed, or been teased, in some form as far back as 2014; with the Workspace App, for instance, serving as the final manifestation of the company’s vision for a unified digital workspace that it has outlined in many iterations over the years.

Hewitt said Citrix needs to focus on messaging here though, differetiating its service from rival ones. He said: «For one, it needs to better delineate how its product is different from VMware’s Workspace One product, such as its inclusion of ShareFile and its strong support for MAM-only deployments.»

He added: «Citrix will need to clearly define why products like Secure Mail and Secure Hub offer a better experience than the native solutions if they want to keep moving in that direction.»

Security also featured prominently with the rollout of Citrix Analytics, a machine learning-powered tool that aims to build profiles for individual users to mitigate the threat of human error – a cyber threat echoed by many figures over the course of the week, including former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.

Hewitt noted that the product is very focused on security use cases, but that «there are doubts on how valuable those analytics will be across varied vendor ecosystems that many customers have today».

The conference, overall, was received well, with customers and partners pleased in general with what Citrix had delivered. But for all the emphasis the company put on the ‘future of work’, Synergy 2018 was ironically lacking in any sense of futurescaping that I had been expecting.

Seeing some kind of projection for how the future of work may look in, say, five years’ time, would have complemented an all-in-all successful conference, as Citrix positions itself strongly in the market.

Red Hat’s annual meet is a chance for the company and its customers, to celebrate all things open source; yet this year’s summit was about something more important.

With the weight of 25 years behind it, the pressure was on the company to make a bold stand, proving to the industry that it can ward against the likes of Amazon and other goliaths looking to wrestle control of the highly lucrative hybrid cloud market.

The past few days have proved one thing. Red Hat is poised to become the dominant force in hybrid cloud and open source.

Setting the tone of the conference, Red Hat immediately announced that IBM would be fully containerising its entire WebSphere application portfolio over to Red Hat’s OpenShift platform – a direct rival moving its services over to Red Hat technology. It’s precisely the sort of knockout announcement the company needed.

If that wasn’t enough to persuade its customers of its value in the market, Red Hat also announced a partnership with Microsoft on the creation of the industry’s first jointly-managed container platform – essentially OpenShift running on Microsoft Azure, including both its on-premise and hybrid cloud platforms.

With those two major announcements aside, Red Hat took the time to detail its plans for the integration of CoreOS into its wider portfolio, something that customers have been waiting for since the acquisition was announced in January.

The integration, alongside new offerings through IBM and Microsoft, means that over the next few months the company will have access to a far greater number of potential customers, with a greater portfolio of products to offer them.

It’s no wonder then that Red Hat is confident it will extend its earnings winning streak, having already marked 64 consecutive quarters of revenue growth – an unprecedented feat. While the company is far from the monetary value of tech’s biggest players, it’s fast becoming the most important company in the open source space.

Red Hat considers itself to be the Switzerland of the tech industry, and while that message may be nauseating, it’s difficult to argue against the notion of removing vendor lock-in for customers, nor doubt Red Hat’s ability to sway traditional technology giants over to open source.

While executives expressed a willingness to engage with trends they see as being future growth opportunities – namely serverless computing and automation – it will be another Summit or two before we see any meaningful action on those fronts. For the time being, hybrid remains Red Hat’s focus.

Red Hat will be one to watch over the next year. With IBM and Microsoft already on side, it’s anyone’s guess which technology giant will be lured next.

Ryanair is to move almost all its infrastructure to AWS following a successful migration of some of its IT systems.

The budget airline plans to close the vast majority of its data centres over the next three years. It already runs several core production workloads on AWS, such as Ryanair Rooms and Ryanair.com, and is building a company-wide data lake on Amazon S3, using Amazon Kinesis to gain insights from customer and business data.

The airline is also ditching Microsoft SQL Server in favour of Amazon Aurora to run an email marketing campaigns in Europe in a bid to cut down costs in communicating with its 22 million European subscribers.

“We’ve chosen to work with the world’s leading cloud to develop and deliver services that will transform our customers’ travel experiences. By rebuilding core applications, converting data into actionable insights, and creating intelligent applications, we are putting the solutions in place to continue our leadership in the travel industry,” said Ryanair’s CTO, John Hurley.

It is also working with the AWS ML Solutions Lab to create an application that enables the company to automatically detect surges in demand for flight segments and anticipate schedule changes.

“Machine learning is hugely important to our growth, and we’re pursuing a variety of AWS machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, to enhance customer UI experience and personalise the myRyanair portal for every unique traveller,” said Hurley.

“We’re currently trialling Amazon Lex to enhance our customer support experience, by intelligently routing customer support requests to the right type of assistance – whether that be a customer support representative or an artificial intelligence-driven interaction.”

Mike Clayville, vice-president of worldwide commercial sales at AWS, said the airline’s plans to move to AWS are much like a lot of other enterprise looking to migrate as many of their existing applications as they can as quickly as possible.

“Because we have the most comprehensive set of cloud services, including our leading machine learning and deep learning services, Ryanair will be able to employ those services to drive greater customer and employee satisfaction. We’re excited to help them create first-class experiences on AWS as they continue to use our capabilities and services at an accelerated pace,” he said.

Specialist insurers Beazley have been using Citrix products for a number of years, celebrating the culmination of a journey that has led them to be among the finalists at Citrix’s Innovation Awards this year.

The winner, WAGA, was crowned by CEO David Henshall during the keynote address in the Anaheim Convention Centre, California, this week – but simply featuring represents another big step in Beazley’s journey to streamline its business.

«At the moment we’re undertaking a huge activity-based working programme change,» said Dale Steggles, Beazley’s architect and leader of end-user technologies. «That’s changing the physical location, people, soft skills, as well as technology – trying to provide a huge mobility to the workforce globally.»

Citrix has underpinned a lot of that activity, according to Steggles, with the use of its products XenDesktop and XenApp, for instance, but also the likes of ShareFile and SecureMail.

Founded in 1986, Beazley grew out of its London offices to expand in the United States in 2005 – and has subsequently opened offices in Paris, Munich, and a host of other locations including the Middle East.

Speaking with Cloud Pro, Steggles was joined by Mark Moerdyk, Beazley’s head of IT infrastructure and engineering, who outlined how his team made several strong strategic decisions in the way they expanded.

«One of them was saying actually that we didn’t want to decentralise our infrastructure, and so we opted for Citrix to actually build out our US offices and enable our business across the US, while managing to consolidate our infrastructure into two data centres,» he explained.

On the day-to-day benefits the business has accrued, particularly in the recent history, Moerdyk added: «It’s the enablement of the business that’s been the most important element.

«We were actually reimagining and redesigning our physical office spaces to actually support the way people want to work, we take feedback from our users, and they’re consistently saying they don’t have the right environments to do their jobs, so we’ve actually embarked on a programme where we’re changing all of that.»

He noted an increased sense of mobility, driving gains in productive, includes hot-desking and remote working, leading to a «10 to 20% productivity gain just by enabling a different way of working».

Steggles continued to outline how, technically-speaking, Beazley has managed to transform its infrastructure outlay that has laid the foundations for the firm’s greater mobility.

«We’ve been able to centralise 1,800 endpoints – that used to be 1,800 physical devices inside the perimeter – these are laptop and desktop devices, so we’ve changed that into where 80% of our users are hosting a shared desktop; managing one image, one workflow, one deployment mechanism – across four data centres globally.

«Previously, whether it’s product updates, whether it’s patching it’s patching, all that environment we had to touch on in end-points, now we just touch it once.

«Update a master image, and its done for 80% of your organisation. It’s then really helped us focus on business drive – around innovation rather than just keeping the lights on.»

The challenges, meanwhile, for Beazley, have historically risen in maintaining collaboration between different productivity apps and services, and reducing layers of complexity that have been created over years of developing IT infrastructure.

«Today we have four or five applications you’d need to deploy to a mobile device to be productive – reducing that down to one – that is a huge leap forward,» said Steggles, pinning his hopes on Citrix’s Workspace App materialising.

«One space, one environment; I’d go there to get any activities – the share, collaborate, connect with content, I think it’s a really good place to be.»

But the linchpin of Citrix’s role in Beazley’s outlay has been the way in which it gives smaller organisations access to an equivalence of the sort of expensive infrastructure that has only conventionally been available to larger enterprises.

«For us it’s about taking that challenge and working with our partners to drive efficiencies where we can and try push the business – whether for example it’s standing up an office in Barcelona over a VPN – over an internet connection – because the business wants to try to incubate it, wants to see whether its viable to put an office together in Barcelona with minimal investment.

«Previously, we’ve been unable to do that without the use of massive infrastructure outlay, now we just ship a device, give an access key to the user, and they login from anywhere in Barcelona.»

This is a point echoed by Citrix’s Sridhar Mullapudi, vice president of product management for Workspace services. Speaking to Cloud Pro, Mallapudi said one of the key benefits for businesses of its technology, for SMBs in particular, was on the infrastructure side.

«For SMBs what cloud usually does is it brings the economics and time to value enterprises used to have. So before, enterprises used to have a lot of budget, so they could actually implement these large IT projects and infrastructure investments which SMBs can’t do,» said Mallapudi. 

«With cloud-based solutions, like what you’ve seen today, Workspace, and things like that, it just makes it easier for SMBs to consume and get the same power that was probably historically reserved for enterprises but now is available through cloud.»

Bestselling author and former Wall Street trader Michael Lewis called for data analytics to be much-better harnessed by large organisations and governments in a Q&A session at Citrix Synergy.

In an event marking the final day of Citrix’s annual Synergy conference, this year hosted in Anaheim, California, the author of Moneyball, and The Big Short, discussed how technology has affected the financial sector, how data has changed sport, and the role AI plays in human decision-making.

He cited data belonging to the US government, «the biggest company on the planet», on how data analytics can be better-harnessed to not only gain insights, but develop smarter public policy.

«The federal government is a trove of enormous databases that people have only scratched the surface of,» he said, adding we are only starting to see this being better harnessed.

«The only reason we know about the opioid crisis is the national institute for health data on distribution of prescription drugs – which was made available to the public under the Obama administration in a way it was accessible.»

He told the audience «we wouldn’t even know» about the burgeoning opioid crisis affecting parts of the United States if not for analysts at Propublica, a nonprofit newsroom based in New York, taking and analysing this data.

Lewis also spoke about how technology had fundamentally changed the financial sector and how incentives to make short-term profits led to the financial crisis – issues at the heart of The Big Short and Flash Boys.

He explained how traders began to learn that their physical distance and location had an effect on how fast they were getting information about markets, and how high-frequency traders at BATS Global Market built faster networks to the other 12 exchanges scattered around New Jersey so they could detect big sell alerts and sell in front of rivals.

«What happened is, the stock market, instead of being about fundamental investment decisions, starts to become just about speed; how fast can you get from one exchange to the other, or how fast you can assemble a picture of the markets that is more accurate.

«If you can see prices before everybody else – it’s the ultimate form of insider trading.»

Lewis explained how traders began building faster networks to connect markets together, by trying to lay the straightest fibre-optic lines possible – a process that involved blowing up mountains, and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, to gain only a few milliseconds of advantage, adding «there’s a kind of madness to it».

«There’s a point where the speed – it’s not actually adding anything to the economic efficiency – it’s all about gaming the market; all about finding out what people are doing and and getting ahead, or assembling a picture of the market that’s a millisecond faster than the market itself,» he said. 

The other side of the equation, he noted, was about slowing down the New York Stock Exchange, or Nasdaq, as another way of widening the gap: «The incentives are to widen the gap of time between when an ordinary investor gets a piece of information, and when a high-frequency trader gets a piece of information.»

«This is a malign use of technology; I don’t think this adds anything to the wealth of the society. It does make a high percentage of high-frequency traders very rich.»