I've just taken a week out of my current contract with an investment bank for a bit of a technology refresh at the Microsoft TechEd Europe conference.
Six thousand techies (about 98% male!) descended on the Messe Berlin for a full week of presentations, hands-on-labs, a vendor showcase, and lots and lots of coffee.
Microsoft divide their "technical" audience into "IT Professionals" (i.e. people that manage infrastructure and keeps systems running) and "Developers" (i.e. people that build new applications). Lots of presentations at TechEd start with a few questions for the audience - "Which of you out there are the IT Pros? Ok, and how about the Devs?" I don't put my hand up for either. So why would I go to TechEd?
I haven't really written much on my blog in recent years about what I actually do for a living, other than the tagline "crossing the chasm between business and IT". I've spent the best part of the last three years doing "solution architecture" within financial services organisations. This essentially means recommending which technology combinations to use to help solve business problems. This requires good business analysis skills and a broad understanding of the capabilities of particular technologies and the skills that are available within the organisational context to leverage those technologies. It also involves a bit of politics, but we'll save that commentary for a separate blog post some other time.
My current contract has been heavily focused on the business analysis end of the spectrum. With significant changes afoot in the technology industry, and with my legacy as a Microsoft consultant earlier this decade, I thought it wise to spend some time getting a better understanding of what's going on in the IT industry today and what's coming up in the next few years on the Microsoft technology front.
The big theme for the conference (and indeed for most technology conferences at the moment) was "the cloud" - Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This is all about replacing as much of the technology (and the roles to support technology) as possible in corporate servers rooms and data centres with commodity services delivered via massive data centres managed by the big technology companies. In essence, the future is about renting your software, platforms, and servers on an as-needed basis.
While this is all good news from an economics point of view, it will have a significant impact on the people that work in the technology industry. If you are an infrastructure person (and this includes the application server admins out there), and you want to remain an infrastructure person, you'll eventually be working for one of a dozen or so big infrastructure companies, most probably in a (relatively) low cost employment location. I think almost all the corporate IT Pro jobs and small business "IT guy" jobs will disappear very quickly over the next ten years.
These IT Pro jobs will be replaced, to some extent, by data analysis and financial analysis jobs - monitoring the performance and cost effectiveness of infrastructure, platforms, and apps in the cloud, and making financially justified decisions on whether to ramp up or ramp down the service offerings that your organisation subscribes to. Get out your spreadsheets ladies and gentlemen - we're all about to become Excel experts!
Note: Mostly for personal reference, I've created basic back-dated blog posts for some of the key break-out sessions that I attended at TechEd Europe, but if you want to ask me about specific topics or sessions that I attending please email me or contact me on twitter @adrianhind. Despite the hype around the cloud, I predominantly attended sessions related to methodologies (agile, scrum, etc), application platforms (SharePoint, Azure), and business intelligence.
