Comment On-premises IT brings tech sales jobs in its wake. Cloud IT kills them.

That's the thinking of a territory account manager in a storage IT startup. The thought process starts: "There is probably some statistic where, for every IT deal that goes to the cloud, there are 20 traditional tech sales jobs that are eliminated."

How so? When manufacturers' sales teams (servers, storage, networking, security, etc...) don't get the sale, then distribution sales teams, VAR sales teams, and then down the line, affecting all the way to multiple HR, Accounting, and other teams working for these tech companies, will not have jobs.

The net result is that "a lot of upper middle class job positions that simply won't exist any more".

Common sense says this conclusion is true. Public cloud computing won't simply affect on-premises IT system suppliers; it will also affect the supply chain between them and their end-customers. There's little ability for a VAR to offer services on top of a customer buying IT resources from Amazon, Azure, etc, instead of buying a VAR's kit for on-premises deployment.

As far as VARs and the like, selling on-premises kit and dependent services, are concerned, the Amazon, Azure, Google and Oracle clouds are killer whales aiming to destroy their business models and causing staff reductions in the wake of their growth.

Every time you or your family buy stuff from Amazon, VAR sales and support people, you are feeding the beast that wants to kill your job. ®