Over the past three decades a lot has happened in the ICT world, I’m not even going to summarize it. But when you’re around for some time you might wonder what to do with the next wave of great technologies coming at us. About 14 years ago I already had that feeling and decided to do Microsoft only. But within that portfolio, wow, far too much to handle.
I realize that if I’m going to throw myself on Server8, Hyper-V3 and System Center 2012, that will only be for a couple of years. If I don’t throw myself at it, I’ll never close the gap again.
I’m gonna be picky though, trying to imagine what life of an ICT Pro will look like when Server8 is old school. Last week I led a workshop for people who train young high potentials, what should the focus on? A lot of Cloud stuff, but that is not specific enough.
Classic IT Pro’s do their Server stuff, networking, storage and the lot. But due to Datacenter Automation tools just one Operator can manage hundred or thousands of servers, so that is not the road to go. To be blunt: Who needs servers, who needs an OS? It’s all about the App and corresponding data. And when that App is somewhere out there we do not even need to deploy it any longer. Bye, bye, decade of deployment.
Current IT Pro’s will do the job in the cloud-transition period, the newbies will never get that experience and they do not need to because it’s only worth something for a short period of time. So what should the newbies focus on? I think there’s a couple of areas where they can create themselves very good positions.
Identity, authentication and authorization Management along with security policies will be booming within the corporate environment. It’s hard for a lot of the current “server huggers” to look beyond their line of duty. They are losing their control.
Application Development, Cloud Apps, probably HTML5 based. No more device or OS specific packages needed, the App runs out there.
Business Intelligence. Over the years we have gathered humongous amounts of data of which about 90% is never being used. We don’t even know that we don’t know what treasures are in there.
And that is where old meets new, Certificate Services, Rights Management Services, Federation Services, App-V and Server App-V, SharePoint, SQL, .NET are some of the Microsoft technologies that both current IT Pro’s and future IT Pro’s will have to master through Certification and hands-on experience.