Quote Originally Posted by 3Z3VH View Post
In the next 5 years, you say ? Most large corporations take about half that time just to upgrade from one OS to another... I could not imagine they would be able to migrate everything to a remote site and maintain all capabilities using existing WAN transports in under 5 years, and have any sort of success... more or less every company in the world.

The absolute BEST you could hope for, is that in 5 years the CAPABILITY to do this would be there, but there is no way it would be implemented that quickly.

Also, your dev team is still needed for all custom apps and DBs... whether the server is here, or on mars, as long as they have connectivity, it doesn't matter where they program from... and if they try to outsource it overseas, they will see how quickly the language barrier makes their dev budget and turnaround times skyrocket.

What about Network support ? Some guy in India isn't very likely going to be able to come configure the local switch when it loses all connectivity, is he ?

Sys Admin ? Who is going to come show the customer how to set up a new printer ? Even video tutorials aren't going to show the less technically adept how to do it. They need their hand held. Not to mention, who is going to make the customized video tutorials for YOUR network ?

What about companies, or government entities that have offline networks for security ? They have no connections to the outside world. how are they supposed to trust 3rd parties with their data ?

Bottom Line: Local IT staff will ALWAYS be in demand.
^ This.

I work for a company who pushes for server consolidation (which includes offsite usage), and even our most fanciful forecasts don't show the future that tomb18 sees in 5 years.

@tomb18:
Whether you have 2 datacenters or 5 datacenters doesn't make a difference. I'd bet that your 2 datacenters are virtualized, and thus run the same # of OS's that the old one did, just in a smaller footprint. Aside from basic toolmonkey stuff, that still requires the same number of admins.

As to servers all being moved to hosted services... we wish! We try to sell that, but it's not universally accepted, not by far. There are huge issues with adoption.

Now with that all said - will we eventually see things tightening up? Sure. The software industry has already gone through a lot of it. But honestly, it's so easy to start into IT at a much higher salary than a person generally deserves and we can definitely trim some fat. But as it stands, I will remain true to my assertion that now is a great time for someone to get into IT (excepting maybe programming, but really I know nothing about that area) provided they are willing to actually work at staying current and certified.