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Is lack of expertise inhibiting your organization's desire to deploy apps on "the cloud?
There's a great post written by John Stokes "Crisis in the Cloud: How Tech Bubble Stifles Innovation & Hampers Cloud’s Adoption" http://t.co/n0g5E. In it he cites results of Symantec’s State of the Cloud 2011 survey. The survey asked IT departments about their staff’s readiness to make the leap into the cloud, and here’s what it found:
About half of the organizations surveyed said their IT staff is not ready for the move to cloud. While a handful (between 15 and 18 percent) rated their staff as extremely prepared, roughly half rated their IT staff as less than somewhat prepared.
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4 Answers
Mr. Stokes' article is quite interesting on several fronts - not all of which I agree with, but that's a different conversation.
What I think it relevant in his post is the notion of application architectures and how they are evolving. We moved from mainframe days to distributed computing, client server computing and Web 1.0/2.0 models, and we had the same problem(s) - talent shortage, talent raiding, skill atrophy, Moore's Law, etc. So the introduction of the "cloud" is a continuation of the same skills-related issues we've seen for many years.
While I somewhat agree with Mr. Stokes' (and Ping Li's) views on the notion of "go go funding", I don't think it's as big a contributor to the problem as they make it to be. I think it gets magnified by the degree of talent-raiding and talent-acquisition through M&A. Just look at the outrageous salaries and compensation packages that are being paid in some areas. So it's not so much a problem of people jumping ship to go work for the next 2-3 person startup. It's people ping-ponging from one hot logo to the next. But, in reality, this has little affect on the other 99% of the IT world made up of the enterprises that are the basis of your question. Very doubtful that someone from Google or Facebook or Zynga is going to jump ship to work at a manufacturing company to be a cloud programmer...
If you look at the Symantec survey, I think it just exacerbates the problem. We have multiple definitions for essentially the same thing - distributed, services-based applications. I'm not sure I can make the leap that Mr. Stokes does with respect to highly parallel apps being the norm for the cloud. Sure, there are things like big data that require these skills, but as Dennis Morgan points out, if your staff knows how to build distributed apps on top of SOA or REST or other API services, then you're a long way towards building apps that can take advantage of the services-oriented nature of the cloud.
To [finally] answer your question, I don't think it's just a lack of expertise issue that inhibits cloud adoption. Mr. Stokes' point about Moore's Law may have some bearing in the sense that with cheap technology many IT shops would rather just "throw more hardware" at the problem as opposed to re-architecting aging applications to make them perform more effectively and efficiently. So this might be construed as inhibiting cloud adoption. But even with the cost benefits driven by Moore's Law, IT shops are still very budget constrained - just look at the economy. So there's the ongoing and nagging reluctance to spend money on anything - not just the cloud.
Net result, it's a lot of factors that can inhibit any given enterprise from adopting the cloud model. But I think there's a whole lot more cloud adoption going on than we realize. It's just "IT 101" without the fancy marketing labels.
BTW - here's the link to Mr. Stokes' article - http://goo.gl/GxIe6
If yout staff has some SOA (Service Oriented Arch) skills then you have some important background skills already. Go to a Webinar or live event on Cloud computing to gain more exposure.
You need someone to lead this effort first and foremost. You can leverage your IT skills base as you move in the cloud direction.
Mr Keahey is right on the mark as usual. Good job.
I would say there are mixed opinions on this point. One customer I have spoken with tells me that they often speak with cloud service providers and ask about professional services, but when the time comes to pony up, the CSP is a day late and a dollar short. In this case, I would say the talent shortage is problematic since the CSPs don't have the bandwidth necessary to train the customer, which mean both come up short.
That said, I don't see that as an inhibitor to cloud adoption, just a short term hurdle. Businesses see the value of cloud computing and are reaching for it, they just need support, which is not available to them. meanwhile, I believe adoption will continue to happen just at a slower rate than if there was a wealth of resources available to the market.
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