Cloud: The Job Neutron Bomb Of The IT Industry?

So apparently cloud business is a dog that will eventually bite off the hand that feeds it. That’s the opinion of The Register’s Chris Mellor. According to his opinion piece available here, on-premises IT brings tech sales jobs in its wake, while cloud IT kills them.

“There is probably some statistic where, for every IT deal that goes to the cloud, there are 20 traditional tech sales jobs that are eliminated,” he says.

He goes on explaining how the sales team’s failure essentially kills positions down the line:

“When manufacturers’ sales teams (servers, storage, networking, security, etc…) don’t get the sale, then distribution sales teams, VAR sales teams, and then down the line, affecting all the way to multiple HR, Accounting, and other teams working for these tech companies, will not have jobs.”

The net result is that “a lot of upper middle class job positions that simply won’t exist any more”.

So basically, the public cloud doesn’t just kill on-premises IT system supplier, its effects are much wider: “There’s little ability for a VAR to offer services on top of a customer buying IT resources from Amazon, Azure, etc, instead of buying a VAR’s kit for on-premises deployment.”

However, what it’s hard to conclude from Mellor’s opinion piece is whether or not this is a good thing. My interpretation of his last sentence is that it’s a bad thing:

“Every time you or your family buy stuff from Amazon, VAR sales and support people, you are feeding the beast that wants to kill your job.”

However, technology advances have destroyed jobs many times before, but have also created new ones in the process as well.