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October 20th, 2012

I run IT for a small business here in the Far North of New Zealand as a favor to family members.

While it’s a small business, it’s one of the largest employers in the region. The employees are decentralized and I thought about establishing the right kinds of network connections and remote access systems, servers, backup power supplies, etc. and then I thought, “Is this even necessary anymore?”

No, it isn’t. Not for this business, or countless others like it.

I set them up on Google Apps. No servers.

That’s right. No servers.

This business runs on residential (that is, crap) grade DSL connections, mobile broadband, free Wi-Fi in town and “smart” phones. If the main facility was turned into a smoking cinder, or washed into the sea, or whatever, all that would be necessary to resume operations would be commodity devices and an Internet connection. The data that they rely on is in the cloud by default (with local cache for when the intertubes are broken).

As they got down to making-do with this stuff (despite Google Apps being not-so-great in a lot of ways), I thought to myself, “IT workers are even more doomed than before.” I’d burned out on this sort of work back in 2002, so it was over for me on a personal level way back then. I went back that last time around 2004 after I met Becky so that we could buy our place. But now… If organizations are able to shitcan their server rooms… HA! Fill it to the rim with Grim!

I know, Mr. IT, you snicker, but it’s going to go like this: The IT jobs are increasingly going to fall into two broad categories, 1) near minimum wage level hardware set-up and swap-out monkeys on the client side and 2) people who can build and maintain warehouse-scale megasystems, colloquially known as, “the cloud.”

If you think that the cloud is a passing fad, you’re wrong. It’s like voice over IP. Remember how crappy VoIP was in the early days? Having to “Reboot the phones,” etc? No matter how many problems people have with VoIP, it’s too cheap not to use. Cloud computing makes the savings companies realized from VoIP seem like pocket change. Cloud computing allows companies to eliminate rooms full of expensive, power hungry hardware, the support systems, and more importantly, the jobs of the people who built and maintained all of that stuff. And since IT is THE most hated division in organizations, even better.

Anyway, I need to go feed our chickens…

Via: Eweek:

“The big catalyst of the next shift in the enterprise is Windows 8,” Benioff said. “People are asking do I go to Windows 8 or not,” he added, calling the situation a “gambit.” However, “This was not the case with Windows 7. You heard about the Windows 7 upgrade cycle; you’re not going to hear about the Windows 8 upgrade cycle. This is the end of Windows.”

During his keynote, Benioff described various eras of computing, from the mainframe era in the 1960s to mini-computing in the ‘70s, to client server in the ‘80s, cloud computing in the ‘90s, mobile computing in the 2000s and social computing in the 2010s.

Benioff said you can go to any AT&T store and find any number of devices you can use in BYOD environments, such as iPhones, iPads, and Android phones and tablets, among other things. “You didn’t have this kind of choice 48 months ago,” he said.

Meanwhile, also helping to spur the shift in the enterprise is a changing of the guard, Benioff said.

“The next generation of leaders has come up and the last generation is going out,” Benioff said. “A lot of the people who made that Oracle or Microsoft [purchase] decision are no longer there. The new people in there are modern, up-to-date, and they have a new brand preference. How they view technology is different.”

Moreover, fast wireless technology such as LTE is changing the game, too, Benioff said. The next generation of LTE technology is going to eliminate the need for LANs and WANs, he said.

“With this networking, everything is moving to the cloud,” Benioff said. “We are on a train and we’re not getting off it.”