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Cloud Computing: The Great Job Creator or Job Destroyer?
The cloud will create 14 million jobs from now until 2015 according to an IDC research report commissioned by Microsoft. That’s welcome news where many economies are still staggering from the after effects of the 2008 Great Recession, where in just the US alone, 8 million jobs were lost.
In over only three years time, cloud computing will inject $1.1 trillion of global revenues and will create staggering numbers of new jobs. The report says that most of the jobs will be created in small and mid-size business, especially in the communications and manufacturing sectors. Unfortuanely, the report estimates that only 1.2 million of the new jobs will be in the United States.
The predictions seem to run counter to what many people have been thinking — that the cloud is destroying jobs. How can this be? After all, the cloud is all about consolidation and economies of scale. The cloud is designed to centralize and streamline IT operations. One can visualize that adoption of the cloud will accelerate the downsizing of many small IT teams that manage on-premise computing resources, replaced instead by mammoth cloud data centers operated by VM-automation and a few IT wizards that can control the entire operation from their computer screens of dashboards.
The catalyst for generating huge cloud growth, as envisioned by the IDC report, is that businesses won’t simply replace their existing on-premise operations with similar cloud-based functionality. Instead, businesses will begin to adopt an ever increasing amount of IT capabilities far beyond what they currently are doing.
Carol Reid, sales director for Agile IT, told IDC for the report that “Whereas before, the IT director was chasing fires and tending to pretty basic plumbing, he now has the bandwidth to pursue truly strategic projects that move the business forward.”
Suresh Bhat, associate at Extreme Venture Partners, said that the “Cloud has changed the way we make our investment decisions. We don’t have to invest as early in companies who just have ideas and don’t have a product. They can build stuff themselves using the cloud… The cloud paradigm has really shifted the way things are. Five or 10 years ago, people weren’t depending on the cloud as much, maybe for liability issues, but now I think the cloud has become quite predominant now in the startup scene.”
John Gantz, author of the report, said that “A common misperception is cloud computing is a job eliminator, but in truth it will be a job creator — a major one. And job growth will occur across continents and throughout organizations of all sizes because emerging markets, small cities and small businesses have the same access to cloud benefits as large enterprises or developed nations.”
David Linthicum, CTO and co-founder of Blue Mountain Labs, said that “we tend to look at the question of how many people will be hired to support this new technology. That’s not the question. The real question is how many people will be hired — period.”
