One of the top­ics that was grace­fully skirted at Struc­ture 2011 was the ques­tion of whether Cloud com­put­ing would cost jobs in IT.

The hon­est answer is of course jobs will be lost:

• Remem­ber that IT is a cost cen­ter and cost sav­ings is always good.
• Remem­ber that Cloud tech­nol­ogy (pub­lic or pri­vate) brings automa­tion that replaces man­ual activity.
• Remem­ber that the use of pub­lic Cloud offer­ings enable a trade between fixed and vari­able expenses that includes the use of per­ma­nent staff.

So it should come as no sur­prise that the increased use of Cloud tech­nol­ogy and archi­tec­ture will dimin­ish the ranks of some the tra­di­tional admins in a data cen­ter. The story is by no means bleak for those who work in enter­prise IT. The Cloud impact also includes a gen­eral up-leveling of peo­ple in the data cen­ter (e.g., a need for sys­tem admins who can under­stand, for exam­ple, appli­ca­tion per­for­mance in a more com­plex and shared envi­ron­ment). And, as Randy Mott tells the HP story (Randy Mott’s Secret Sauce), he was able to dimin­ish over­all IT spend­ing con­sid­er­ably while at the same time increas­ing the amount spent on inno­va­tion and forward-looking activ­ity. So less can actu­ally be quite a bit more.….