Cloud Computing trend to spell doom for IT Admin jobs

It will spell doom if you didn’t do anything and kept sitting. As technological trends and more and more autonomous solutions are displacing work from folks (IT staff)  to machines/adaptive grid that do it timely, politely and obediently…and even very cheap! See this testimonial:

“In 2005 we needed 10 to 20 times the money we need today. There was a certain amount that entrepreneurial intelligence couldn’t get around. Somehow you had to pay that piper,” said James Siminoff, chief executive of Grid.com and Simulscribe, which changes phone messages into text.

One hour and $50

A decade ago, Michael Eisenberg, a general partner with Benchmark Capital in Israel, recalls he had to pay $10,000 each for Sun Microsystems servers.

“Today if I want to start up, it takes me one hour and $50 and I can turn on my capacity from Amazon Web Services from anywhere in the world,” Eisenberg said.

Some fledgling companies like Delve Networks are capitalizing on that trend, charging clients over $250 a month to host video on their websites. Delve itself owns little more than the personal computers used by its 20 employees.

Lets first examine my experiences from my past life, current life and future predictions/plans :

Past life – (Maritime – Oil&Gas – worked for several Fortune 100-500 firms such as AP Moller, NYK etc)

I come from an industry, Oil/Gas sector, where I earned my first dollars. I came in, displacing the “expensive Europeans/Americans”, that job was back in the early 90s. Some Indian fleet owners, included their vessels to a Dutch fleet and those vessels were slowing displacing the expensive staff with the “inexpensive” staff. Soon comes mid 90s and the “inexpensive” staff (me thus) get trained/programmed folks from Philippines, and soon we had to quit. I decide to change professions then (1995)and move on to another Country/another industry altogether (I also had personal reasons obviously). Come late 90s the “inexpensive” staff (Philipinos now) gets replaced by Ghanians, Algerians etc ,while all this was happening the transportation industry was getting heavily industrialized and had very few members to conduct “heavy and expensive” work, only leaving “valve shutters/openers” do the mundane work, so the headcount went down dramatically, 13 folks to a vessel about 300m long (Compare that to vessels in 60s where hundreds of people were stuffed like sardines). Soon that job (semi-automated) may be transferred to a non-human like monkeys (I’ve heard that many Greeks used to literally train dogs to do that on-board — can you imagine that!). The final step would be to have a AI-Robotized operation where the human would be totally left out of the equation.

That was industrialization where we met and overcame several challenges like bringing down Halon/Ozone CFC challenges; our environmental responsibility was duly tested [I was a safety officer; fire fighter as well] by all national/international authorities.

Present Life – Mad Hybrid, De-centralized World of IT confronts Virtualization/Cloud Computing

The moment I arrived here and took up my first job as a Project Manager/Oracle DBA (I built some Real-time Gas Monitoring systems in my previous life and used databases to store information) at a shipping firm, I quickly realized that this industry would go down that commoditization and industrialization path, like my previous life. I couldn’t imagine how resources and work was unevenly distributed among folks and why so many people were doing so little work! [I was a tremendous multi-tasker in my past life and heavily disciplined -- we had to, we were only handful of people]. Productivity was low and decentralized IT was a great place to hangout, loads of freedom.

2001/2002 gave us a scare but the faith was still cosmetically “restored”. Many industries were beginning to realize the dangerous exposure they had to the globally prevalent financial system (at the toxic products that were being bought/sold) but we just waited. Until it happened (as all of us are noticing it).

In the same year I entered and migrated to The Netherlands (1998), I started dabbling with Virtualization technology. This “out-of-the-box” perspective gave me an opening to the present and the future (read later). Did you know that I had successfully deployed and implemented desktop virtualization already in 2000! It was possible since it was on small scale but I did notice the strength of this mobile-, empowered and yet simple form of multi-tasking, self-service capability. I guess my past habits just stuck on to me and I wanted to do more than just sit behind a PC and do a job where I was spending merely 12.5% of my time productively per week (on an average) – I measured it alright. I also initiated performance management and asked my director to invite a global firm to do the same for all employees — as you can imagine, I was the most hated guy by the IT staff!

Anyways back to technology, I pushed the need for productivity and effective/efficient work methodologies by setting an example myself. Virtualization was beginning to get mainstream. I sincerely saw good value of server virtualization, I couldn’t imagine the HVD (Hosted Virtual Desktop) model (I still have trouble understanding it’s value-add through the IT value chain), I somewhat saw opportunities of application virtualization. Do also note that I was heavy into Oracle databases and grid computing (partially), clustering and load balancing etc so I had to distance myself from logic sometimes to see value in “low-level workloads” that could be moved to bigger iron while high I/O workloads could be better left alone!

Anyways virtualization kept evolving and in 2006 I started seriously looking at Cloud Computing and the concepts of Utility/Grid Computing that were/or could be “transformed” to support the pre-Cloud instances/workloads (again low-level workloads) to a more RIA/RWA driven platform, that would be the browser it could be Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Adobe Air, Silverlight etc. Buy and sell, build and tear workloads, re-use and sequester consumption characteristics… lots of things. While thinking and working towards those conceptual models (as the metering one I am co-authoring with a researcher in India), I realized that this time the shift too will be gradual in many cases — for instance if you are sitting behind those “high-level workloads” then you could stay a bit longer or have your job off shored, and fast and rapid in typical “low-level workloads”.

Now all you need to do is to migrate or assess the applications that are Cloud-ready (there are already tools emerging in the markets) and you are ready to literally off-load all those FTEs that had something to hold on to those virtualized workloads (call it apps).

Future Life – Welcome to the Ideation Age (AI, AI supplanting Humans ), Goodbye IT Administrator

While this piece tells you already that the future is here to stay:

IT employees nurturing hopes of onsite projects in exciting locales have to get used to the idea that more work will happen offshore. This trend will happen because of two reasons- increase in revenues from offshore friendly services and more focus in domestic software projects. While RIM, BPO and testing are offshore- friendly, consulting and ERP implementation are onsite intensive. Indian IT companies will also throw more resources in domestic software projects, as they find the demand inside show promise like never before.

“If Indian IT companies don’t look at the domestic market now, then the likes of IBM and Accenture will dominate. So they are bringing some of their bright engineers from onsite locations to the domestic market. There is an increase in the quality of employees working on domestic projects,” said Mr Pari Natarajan, CEO of management consulting firm Zinnov. “The margins are better now because companies have a better idea about how to price their projects here. Also, they can use the processes and solution components that they used for their clients globally for the domestic clients,” Mr Natarajan added.

We are already at the brink of Globally Deliverable, Virtualized Workloads that will be servicized the minute they reach the inflection point. Simply meaning that they will be applications that will eventually move to the web. The same reason for my lack of belief that Virtual Desktops will ever succeed, its all about delivery and applications/services need to be delivered. Deliver it over the wire from a workload that has systematically move over from an impending systemic disaster zone (such as Russia refusing to give gas to NW European nations) to Sub-Sahara where solar energy is powered and data grids would service the apps and even energy (getting my point already by now?) that is streamed to you from a totally distant continent. This consolidation is already taking place and IT IS (Infrastructure Services) is a mere subset of the Globally Distributed and Deliverable Workloads.

Obviously as lot has to happen before we get there but that we will be there and that it will be done to us is what we should be understanding.

What should I do to ride this wave and not perish?

Maybe that is the best way to end this article, or else I would be just spelling doom like all others:

- Get to professional blogging on not only your (current) expertise but also hidden and other expertises

- Start working on your visibility

- Participate in discussions

- Start learning new technologies such as Virtualization (VMware, Xen, Hyper-V, KVM, Oracle VM etc) /Cloud Computing/Infrastructure/Utilities/Web Programming

- Prepare already for the pink slip (by doing the above): It may not be there yet but it will come.

- Explore other industries: Could be anything, who said you havw to stick to IT. Many of my buddies have moved to Energy/Gas/Utilities sectors, they were all cool Web Programmers/Architects. Now they’re learning new skills while their older skills can always be used when needed [See, not anymore a fulltime function anymore]

- Get into high end consulting: Just don’t remain behind the desktops, move around and ask for being given an opportunity to participate in other tracks as well.

While these suggestions might seem very high-level, they will (hopefully) wake you up and get you going.

Good luck!

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