Dell: Cloud won’t damage IT jobs

Cloud computing won’t put IT professionals out of work, according to a senior Dell executive.

New technologies frequently raise concerns about job cuts but IT pros are here to stay, according to Tim Griffin, Dell’s global vice president (VP) for services and solutions.

“This has been a problem for the IT profession for years,” said Griffin, speaking exclusively to Cloud Pro. “We’ve been through the [rumours] managed services were going to put everyone out of a job, but not everyone jumped onto the managed services bandwagon and I don’t [think] you’ll see everyone else jumping onto cloud.”

The VP was keen to emphasise there would “always be a place for the IT technician,” adding: “An awful lot of what companies need out of their dedicated IT resources never actually gets done because they’re tied up with the relatively mundane ‘keeping the lights’ on versus the more strategic projects that are enabling the future of the business.”

Griffin admitted some services would inevitably shift to the cloud, but many will stay in the server room for years to come.

“My personal view is that you’re going to be seeing a hybrid model where people are going to mixing on-premise and cloud, whether it’s software or IT,” he said.

Hybrid model

The reason this joint effort is set to exist comes down to ongoing caution around cloud computing, with even proponents of the technology nervous of transferring everything from their own data centre.

“I had a very interesting conversation with one of our major partners and the executive in question just couldn’t get why people wouldn’t go straight to the cloud,” he said. “So I just asked her, tell me about your home environment. Have you put all your photographs in the cloud? She said ‘no, of course not.’”

“We see that same resistance when people want Exchange servers when they could be going to the cloud, we see it all the time in people building up this hybrid model. You’ve got the technical capability and, for want of a better word, social limitation, and so that’s going to require the hybrid model for some considerable time.”

That means plenty of IT jobs remaining in-house, but also brings up the need for specialists to help move certain aspects to the cloud.

“[Companies] are buying cloud services today, they are buying cloud storage today,” Griffin said. “Some of our biggest customers in the enterprise space for servers and storage are effectively IT infrastructure as a service [IaaS]… providers to their customer base.”

“So it’s a blossoming marketplace but I think that being able to do it requires a certain amount of technical capability. A lot of our development work in this space for services is really about how to enable our customers to migrate and manage a cloud or hybrid environment. It’s not easy to do these things.”

Bringing in help

Dell is putting a lot of faith in the specialist skills of cloud integration services from companies such as Boomi, which it bought in November 2010, to help ease migration.

“They allow us to integrate pieces of software that may exist in the cloud or on-premise for our customers,” said Griffin. “This allows you to move to [a] single log-on between software, avoid duplication of entry and so on, and to do this in a matter of days and weeks rather than months and months of software integration and coding.”

Griffin claimed Boomi drastically cut the time taken for a complicated loyalty scheme project, which needed to work across a dozen airlines. Despite the necessity of spanning all the firms and hooking into each booking system, the work was completed in two months.

This week saw Dell launch a new cloud offering, incorporating the OpenStack operating system into PowerEdge C servers. Read our editor’s thoughts on why this open approach puts Dell in a strong position here.