The Future of IT Professionals

Several years ago I wrote a white paper about the commodization of the IT infrastructure.  In that paper I wrote about datacenter environments becoming less diverse and systems would be either Windows or Linux based systems.  Much of that prediction is rapidly becoming true.

Added onto the trend of Windows and Linux systems dominating the datacenter is the trend towards virtualized computing environments, outsourced datacenters and applications as a service.  With all these trends we are seeing a movement towards virtualized server and networked environments.

Today you can start a business providing a software driven service on a shoestring budget. You can reduce office overhead costs to practically nothing by operating a virtual company.  You can outsource most HR functions such as payroll. Your datacenter costs can also be reduced to literally a few dollars a day by renting space on a virtualized server farm.  As your customer base grows, you can just simply rent the additional computing or network capacity.

If you are developing software, you can also reduce your development costs by utilizing Open Source toolsets and building applications by piecing together already existing Open Source projects. You can also rapidly reduce communication costs both voice and data by employing VOIP technology for voice and VPN technology for internal data transport.

For your office productivity applications, you can opt to use web enabled applications like Google Applications.  If you need a local document writer and spreadsheet program, you can always use OpenOffice. You can outsource email cheaply and even rent project management applications on the web.

Where does this revolution in network computing leave traditional IT personnel who are used to managing farms of servers and their associated applications? One place is to work for a Cloud computing company where there will always be a need to manage real servers and real network devices.  But these positions are likely limited in number, since there are huge economies of scale in managing many essentially identical systems.

I also believe that the commodization will continue to move up the application stack beyond just providing virtualized hardware and operating systems.  We will see rich development APIs develop around various productivity applications.  We already see this with Google Apps and certain applications like Salesforce and Basecamp.  Rather than manage customized applications on your own systems in your own datacenter, the future of computing will be to manage application extensions served up on the virtual cloud.

The above is a different kind of computer and system management.  The traditional relationship with hardware and OS vendors will not longer be relevant.  The ability the design fault tolerant systems will no longer be relevant.  What will become important is the ability to manage service level agreements with the cloud vendors.  To draw an analogy computing will become more like the electricity delivery system and less like running your own generator and distribution system.

In that kind of world as an IT professional you either work for the electric company or you transform your expertise into something relevant up the computing stack. Small organizations will always need IT expertise, but an organization which adopts "cloud" computing will need expertise   geared towards the applications and less towards keeping hardware and their associated OS's running smoothly.