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FREE MOBILE CLOUD COMPUTING CONCEPTS - TRAINING_MODULES_WITH_TONS_OF_VIDEOS

Attention - Cloud Specialists - You're Wanted, and Badly, too

Cloud computing skills are most frequently advertised for jobs located in the San Jose metropolitan area.

More than 5,000 cloud computing job ads were posted online in the United States in February, according to Wanted Analytics, a specialist in real-time business intelligence for the talent marketplace.

Hiring demand for cloud skills has grown drastically, up 92 percent, versus February 2011 and 400 percent compared with the same time in 2010. With the demand for cloud skills growing so quickly, the gap between hiring demand and talent supply across the United States is getting larger and causing more difficulties in sourcing candidates, the report indicated.

Software engineers, systems engineers and network administrators are the technology occupations most commonly required to have cloud computing skills. More than 3,400 of the ads during February were for tech talent, growing 99 percent year-over-year. Although cloud knowledge is most commonly required of computer specialists, technology jobs only account for two-thirds of cloud computing hiring demand during February. Other fields that increasingly require this experience include marketing managers, sales managers, management analysts and financial analysts.

Cloud computing skills are most frequently advertised for jobs located in the San Jose, Calif., metropolitan area. During February, more than 900 job ads in San Jose included requirements for cloud computing, growing 144 percent over the past year. Other metro areas with high demand for cloud skills were Seattle; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco and New York. While employers in San Jose placed the highest number of job ads for this talent pool, the highest year-over-year growth was seen nearby in San Francisco at more than 150 percent.

Cloud computing, which amounts to be the industrialization of enterprise technology infrastructure, will bring a lot of advantages coupled with a lot of lost jobs.

Few disagree that cloud computing will be disruptive to industries, enterprise technology and the way we conduct businesses. The disruption will extend to the workforce.

In other words, humans will be virtualized just like servers are. The upshot from cloud computing is that companies will need fewer data centers. People run data centers. Those jobs are likely to simply disappear.

Johan Jacobs and Ken Brant, two Gartner analysts, made the cloud computing-jobs connection last week at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando. The presentation was categorized as "maverick" in that it may not happen in the allotted time frame. Jacobs and Brant argued by 2020 demand for IT staff dedicated to supporting data centers will collapse.

"The long-run value proposition of IT is not to support the human workforce – it is to replace it," wrote Gartner in its presentation. In other words, any job loss related to offshore outsourcing may look like a walk in the park once cloud computing gets rolling.

The rough argument goes like this:

Computing will be outsourced to the cloud and become an IT utility.

Business processes will be outsourced to software. That outcome will hit all economies---especially emerging ones like India that now dominate technology outsourcing.

As the data center is virtualized the need for people to maintain that infrastructure will go away. In addition, all the people in sales and services linked to building and designing data centers will also lose jobs. When there's less technology infrastructure to support jobs will disappear.

Some of those workers will reinvent themselves and find more opportunities. Others will never match those previous positions. Many IT workers will face hollowed out job prospects just like factory workers did as the U.S. manufacturing base disappeared.

This cloud computing-job connection is just a whisper today. But a few executives I talked to see an offshore outsourcing backlash as a possibility for cloud computing.

If Gartner's post-human industry theory, which dictates that intelligent machines will drive the economy more than people, pans out the economic implications will be huge. There is no need for a human-machine singularity to impact career prospects. Creative destruction looks great on the whiteboard, but there is a human cost.

What's the probability for this cloud vs. jobs scenario? In the long run, I'd argue it's highly likely. The timing---2020---is debatable. Jacobs and Brant highlighted a few scenarios.

• If companies move to private clouds and hybrid infrastructure the job losses won't be as large. Companies will need to maintain people and use brokers for public cloud services.
  
  
• Machines may complement humans more than replace them.
  
  
• However, companies may aim to eliminate assets. Call centers will be run by avatars and software. Business operations will be largely automated.
  
  
• IT utilities emerge. IT utilities will accelerate asset cuts. In this scenario, the goal is to drop physical assets in a hurry.

The last two outcomes will have the most impact on jobs. This scenario ties into what Harvard professor Clay Christensen said last week. Christensen noted that semiconductor companies tout how they are fabless. As a result, Intel is one of the few that actually owns manufacturing facilities. By worshipping profit ratios, companies nuke jobs. In the long run, this focus on ratios hurts innovation.

Gartner noted that this ratio worship is already underway:

CIOs believe that their data centers, servers, desktop and business applications are grossly inefficient and must be rationalized over the next ten years. We believe that the people associated with these inefficient assets will also be rationalized in significant numbers along the way.

We foresee a substantial reduction in the U.S. IT workforce, especially among those supporting the data center and applications, in end-user organizations. According to Gartner's 2011 survey of U.S. CIOs, "Reducing the cost of IT," "Reorganizing IT" and "Consolidating IT operations and resources" were ranked high among their top strategies.

In the same survey, "Virtualization" and "Cloud Computing" were the two top ranked U.S. CIO technology priorities; 83% of U.S. CIOs estimated that their organizations would conduct "more than half of their transactions on a cloud infrastructure" by 2020.

The other argument here is that IT is becoming a necessity good and that points to services provided by utilities. Toss in the fact that compensation is a large expense line in IT budgets and it's clear that there will be pressure to cut expenses via cloud computing and job cuts...................

Spending on public and private IT cloud services will generate nearly 14 million jobs worldwide from 2011 to 2015, according to a new study by the analyst firm IDC. The research, commissioned by Microsoft, also found that IT innovation created by cloud computing could produce $1.1 trillion a year in new business revenues.

“The cloud is going to have a huge impact on job creation,” says Susan Hauser, Microsoft corporate vice president of the Worldwide Enterprise and Partner Group. “It’s a transformative technology that will drive down costs, spur innovation, and open up new jobs and skillsets across the globe.”

One way in which the cloud is helping companies to be more innovative is by freeing up IT managers to work on more mission-critical projects.

“We deployed Microsoft Office 365 and Windows Intune for one of our clients, and the comment we heard from the chief operations officer is that he can actually schedule a meeting with the IT director to talk about strategic applications,” says Carol Reid, sales director for Agile IT, a Microsoft Tier 3 Cloud Champion Member headquartered in San Diego, Calif. “Whereas before, the IT director was chasing fires and tending to pretty basic plumbing, he now has the bandwidth to pursue truly strategic projects that move the business forward.”

In addition, many businesses are using the cloud to improve how they work with customers and partners.

One of the trends we’re seeing is that companies are using cloud-based collaboration software not just for their internal employees, but to engage and share information with partners and vendors,” says Aaron Nettles, co-founder and CEO of Vorsite, a Microsoft Tier 3 Cloud Champion Member based in Seattle, Wash. “So it’s really not just about maintaining technology but also about leveraging it to drive revenue for the business.”

To accommodate the growing interest in the cloud, Nettles plans to double the size of his workforce this year. “It seems like a threshold has been crossed where customers are no longer asking, ‘Is the cloud right?’ but ‘When can we get it deployed?’”

Among the enterprises making use of the cloud to boost innovation is Underwriters Laboratories (UL), a global company that provides safety testing and certification for a wide range of product categories. In recent years, the company has acquired several businesses to broaden the services it offers to customers. Because Office 365 frees the company from adding and maintaining new servers, UL has been able to complete its technology integrations very rapidly.

Whether it’s a large acquisition in China or a small one in Australia, UL can now integrate new employees within a few weeks instead of several months.

“I didn’t have to staff up with a bunch of contractors or take project managers off other projects,” says Christian Anschuetz, the company’s chief information officer. “And that allowed us to take resources that would otherwise have been needed for our internal integration and focus them instead on growing the business to the benefit of customers. I can’t tell you how much that’s worth.”

At the same time, UL has been leveraging Office 365 to improve the way it works with customers, which demands intense collaboration with numerous stakeholders around the globe. By giving Office 365 to its clients, for example, UL has been able to work side-by-side with them over the Internet to resolve safety testing issues more quickly. To expand these technology offerings to more customers, Anschuetz plans to triple the number of SharePoint engineers. “Are there jobs there? Yes,” he says. “We need more resources to get this technology into the hands of our customers, which is to their benefit and delight.”

Moving to the Cloud

Of the 14 million new jobs that the cloud will generate between 2011 and 2015, a roughly equal number will accrue to large and small businesses, according to the IDC study.

Although small businesses make up the majority of employment in most parts of the world, they are generally less computerized. At the same time, IDC expects small- and medium-size businesses to adopt cloud services faster than large companies, many of which are constrained by existing legacy investments. “So when you put it all together, the two trends balance out, and you get a 50-50 split,” says John Gantz, senior vice president at IDC and author of the white paper.

The study found that the number of new jobs produced by cloud computing will be somewhat proportional to the size of each industry, but not entirely. In some industries, such as professional services and retail, the high percentage of small- and medium-size businesses will drive up adoption. In other sectors, such as banking, security issues will slow the move to the public cloud, but may increase adoption of private IT cloud services. Overall, three industries expected to generate the most cloud-related jobs are communications and media (2.4 million), banking (1.4 million), and discrete manufacturing (1.3 million).

The highest percentage of new jobs will occur in emerging markets, according to the study, especially China and India, which together are expected to produce nearly 6.8 million cloud-enabled jobs between 2011 and 2015. This can partly be attributed to the size of their workforces, and partly to the fact that many Chinese and Indian companies aren’t bound by large legacy system investments. “We tend to think of China and India as emerging markets, but they’re actually early adopters of the cloud,” Gantz says. “They’re not bound to existing systems. They’ve skipped that step, so there’s less holding them back.”

Nearly 1.2 million new cloud-related jobs will be created in the U.S. and Canada, according to the IDC study. An early adopter of cloud computing, the U.S. accounted for 62 percent of worldwide spending in public IT cloud services in 2011.

IDC developed its results by analyzing cloud spending trends in more than 40 countries and then using this information to forecast the number of jobs this spending will create.

“Enterprises that embrace cloud computing reduce the amount of IT time and budget devoted to legacy systems and routine upgrades, which then increases the time and budget they have for more innovative projects,” Gantz says. “When IT innovation happens, business innovation is reached, which then supports job creation.”

In a blog post about the study, Robert Youngjohns, president, Microsoft North America, calls the cloud “one of the most profound transformations in computing history.”

“Given the current difficult economic environment, every business is looking to empower their people, reduce costs, improve their customer connections, and create new opportunities through their technology investments,” he writes.

Hauser says Microsoft customers are using the cloud as an opportunity to re-examine their business models for working with customers, vendors, and other stakeholders. By moving to the cloud, for example, one auto sales parts customer has been able to source its parts faster and develop new inventory that will improve the customer experience. Likewise, a large pharmaceutical customer is leveraging the cloud to obtain feedback from think tanks around the world, which it then shares with customers to improve health care. “Again and again, we’re seeing how the cloud is helping our customers save costs and improve the customer experience,” she says.

Ultimately, the cloud will be an important force in helping to restore worldwide economic health, Hauser says. “The cloud is the No. 1 topic among CIOs from around the world,” she says. “They want to know how they can use it to fuel growth. And they want to be sure they have the right people and skills in place to make it happen.”

Analyst firm IDC has just published a study which shows that as cloud adoption across businesses increases increased IT spending is creating more jobs to the tune of almost four million a year.

Cloud-based technologies are a critical step forward for companies. The Cloud allows them to bring full interaction with their customers in a cloud-based environment that has two immediate effects: First, it speeds up communication and makes business faster within a given time frame, this enables more business to be carried out than was possible before without overloading systems. Second it frees up manpower in management and IT and lifts loads off infrastructures. This allows those in charge who, in the past would have been busy dealing with problems, to now focus on strategic planning and further growth.

Case in point quoted in the study, Vorsite, a Microsoft Tier 3 Cloud Champion Member based in Seattle, Washington, is planning to double its workforce this year: “It seems like a threshold has been crossed where customers are no longer asking, ‘Is the cloud right?’ but ‘When can we get it deployed?’” “One of the trends we’re seeing is that companies are using cloud-based collaboration software not just for their internal employees, but to engage and share information with partners and vendors,” says its CEO.

The move to the Cloud is happening across consumer fronts as well. Google’s move to unify its entertainment services, serving eBooks, music and movies and take them into a Cloud-based environment which makes everything automatically available to those who access it, irrespective of device has found many proponents. For a start there is no synching, no wires and instant access from, let’s say a desktop to a tablet to an Android smartphone.

More than that, this personal Cloud which follows consumers wherever they go is also making companies innovate with new products and special offers, which in themselves are leading into an expansion of services and increase of staff.

Cloud technology is now becoming ubiquitous offering business-critical services such as heavy-load websites, where up-time is a requirement, services from hosting providers at ever more competitive prices. For instance in the UK, United Hosting, a frequent receiver of quality awards by the industry has rolled out a true Cloud-based hosting solution at prices which match those of ordinary server-based hosting. Affordability plays an important part in the uptake of Cloud-based services which in itself drives in the creation of business with better uptimes, more robust web presences and greater Cloud-capability which can be deployed with their own customers.

Development in Cloud-computing is now split evenly across two fronts. On the enterprise side customers are served by traditional global players like Microsoft while on personal Cloud computing the lion’s share of the business goes to companies like Apple and Google who get what the individual wants within a Cloud-based environment.

Job growth and capital spend go hand-in-hand with enthusiasm. Right now the energy and drive being put into Cloud computing are creating a momentum which is very hard to stop. Although we are still in its early days, the Cloud is promising to revolutionize much of the traditional way services are accessed and business is done.