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Traditional IT job titles under threat

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 19 Aug 2016
By 2018, 65% of data centre infrastructure investments will be for systems of engagement, rather than for maintaining existing systems, says Fujitsu.
By 2018, 65% of data centre infrastructure investments will be for systems of engagement, rather than for maintaining existing systems, says Fujitsu.

IT jobs in the data centre are under threat as there is a paradigm shift in the data centres, moving from hardware to software-defined.

This was the word from Udo W"urtz, Fujitsu's chief evangelist for data centre business, EMEIA, who was speaking during the Fujitsu World Tour in Johannesburg yesterday.

Software-defined data centre, also known as virtual data centre, is a vision for IT infrastructure that extends virtualisation concepts such as abstraction, pooling, and automation to all of the data centre's resources and services to achieve IT-as-a-service.

According to W"urtz, by 2019, 25% of traditional IT operations job titles will be replaced. He also noted that by 2017, next-generation converged systems customised for flash and software-defined infrastructure will drive about 30% reductions in internal data centre space and staff.

He added that by 2018, 65% of companies' IT assets will be offsite in colocation and cloud data centres, while a third of IT staff will be employees of third-part service providers.

To highlight the problem, he gave the example of US-based networking company Cisco which this week said it will cut nearly 7% of its workforce. Cisco, which expects to start laying off employees from the first quarter, said it will take a charge of about $325 million to $400 million in the quarter.

Describing the impact of digitisation on data centre architecture, W"urtz pointed out that by 2018, 65% of data centre infrastructure investments will be for systems of engagement rather than maintaining existing systems.

"In today's digital economy, enterprises depend on the effective use of technology not just to support ongoing business processes but also to drive digital transformation for competitive differentiation," he said.

"Success or failure of business outcomes ties directly to the effectiveness of their IT service delivery. Data centres are the fountainhead for IT service delivery, so having a well-thought-out data centre strategy is critical."

According to W"urtz, the challenge today is that companies' existing data centres do not match up well with changing requirements at multiple levels.

"The new workloads associated with systems of engagement, insight, and action are highly variable in nature. They have short useful lives and are quite bursty by design."

He also pointed out that the industry has shifted from dependence upon custom software to favour commercial software products towards the latter part of the second-platform era. However, he noted, the changing application-development paradigm associated with third-platform applications is changing the lay of the land.

Third-platform can be seen as reinvigorating interest in in-house development, probably because many third-platform applications are so new that there are no standard types of functionality, and each organisation is trying to create unique differentiation, he said.

"By 2020, 80%of IT infrastructure will be bought on a pay-as-you-go basis. The third platform is being driven by a fresh wave of custom applications, reversing a trend of movement to packaged software among mature second-platform applications."

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