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Meh. I have seen this exact article approximately ten times between 2000 and now; the only thing changing are the buzzwords. "IT departments won't exist in five

Meh. I have seen this exact article approximately ten times between 2000 and now; the only thing changing are the buzzwords. "IT departments won't exist in five years [because OMG $NEWEST_FLASHY_GADGET]". What about some flying cars? We've been getting those "five years from now" since about 1930...

corresation 13y ago
I'd say quite a bit more has changed. Aside from the huge growth of cloud services (Google Apps, Office 365, Amazon EC2 private clouds, etc), the explosion of bring-your-own-device policies, and the enormous advances in connectivity (10 years ago a mid-sized office often had a T1. Now we have dual-500mps connections), consider that most software stacks are completely virtualized now (and anything that isn't is on the short track to being so). That changes everything. Suddenly an external vendor can provide your entire hardware platform, whether by dropping in their own managed hardware solution, or by hooking you into their cloud via a dedicated connection, and that's just for the few outliers that aren't provide as SaaS. The world has completely changed, from a networking, platform, and device perspective. I am perplexed by some of the comments to this article, and have to believe it is a bit of a head-in-the-sand approach. Do I think IT will be gone in 5 years? Hardly. But change is coming at a ferocious pace, and those who ignore it do so at their own peril.
- Piskvorrr 13y ago
  Indeed. I have meant "the only thing that has changed in the article are the buzzwords"; the industry is of course very different from what it was in 2000.
drzaiusapelord 13y ago
Thin clients mean less IT! Thick clients mean less IT! VDI means less IT! Citrix means less IT! Terminals services means less IT! Drupal/Wordpress means no more web devs! Ipads mean less IT! Mobile means less IT! Cloud means less IT! If anything, these things tend to create more IT jobs. Now we need another helpdesk guy to handle everyone's mobile devices, a MDM server, someone or run that, a better local wifi network, a more secure wifi network, etc etc.
- nasalgoat 13y ago
  That said, many of those things did actually result in "less IT" in the sense that fewer people can now run larger installs. For instance, I have a team of four people to run 400+ physical machines, whereas in 2000, I needed a team of ten or so to do a similar job.
  - Piskvorrr 13y ago
    More precisely, "less IT for that one task, while the number of IT tasks grows ever larger".

corresation 13y ago

I'd say quite a bit more has changed. Aside from the huge growth of cloud services (Google Apps, Office 365, Amazon EC2 private clouds, etc), the explosion of bring-your-own-device policies, and the enormous advances in connectivity (10 years ago a mid-sized office often had a T1. Now we have dual-500mps connections), consider that most software stacks are completely virtualized now (and anything that isn't is on the short track to being so). That changes everything. Suddenly an external vendor can provide your entire hardware platform, whether by dropping in their own managed hardware solution, or by hooking you into their cloud via a dedicated connection, and that's just for the few outliers that aren't provide as SaaS. The world has completely changed, from a networking, platform, and device perspective. I am perplexed by some of the comments to this article, and have to believe it is a bit of a head-in-the-sand approach. Do I think IT will be gone in 5 years? Hardly. But change is coming at a ferocious pace, and those who ignore it do so at their own peril.

Piskvorrr 13y ago
Indeed. I have meant "the only thing that has changed in the article are the buzzwords"; the industry is of course very different from what it was in 2000.

drzaiusapelord 13y ago

Thin clients mean less IT! Thick clients mean less IT! VDI means less IT! Citrix means less IT! Terminals services means less IT! Drupal/Wordpress means no more web devs! Ipads mean less IT! Mobile means less IT! Cloud means less IT! If anything, these things tend to create more IT jobs. Now we need another helpdesk guy to handle everyone's mobile devices, a MDM server, someone or run that, a better local wifi network, a more secure wifi network, etc etc.

nasalgoat 13y ago
That said, many of those things did actually result in "less IT" in the sense that fewer people can now run larger installs. For instance, I have a team of four people to run 400+ physical machines, whereas in 2000, I needed a team of ten or so to do a similar job.
- Piskvorrr 13y ago
  More precisely, "less IT for that one task, while the number of IT tasks grows ever larger".