The Year of the Unicorn - TechTalk Episode 34
Transcript
this is Keith Townsen and welcome to virtualized geek episode number 34 uh the year of the Unicorn uh so why are we talking about unicorns uh the geek Whisperers use this term quite a bit though so uh Amy Lewis Don John Troyer and Matthew Bender host a podcast for people who engag in social media as part of their day-to-day business and they've coined the term unicorn as a engineer who has skill Beyond engineering so or Beyond uh it and it systems so you know in their
case they're talking about the chis Chris walls of the world the engineers who have the ability to uh not only Implement technology but talk speak and write about technology uh another uh version of the Unicorn is kind of the Management Consultant kind of my role someone who understands technology and also has training and skill in areas of business uh mine m in particular is it project management so uh it's it's difficult I don't know how long you've been in it or if you're in it at
all you're watching this video but it's pretty difficult to find someone with deep technical skill and also has another uh kind of hidden or even um welldeveloped skill Beyond it so so someone who can take a look at a balance balance sheet and understand the impact of a balance sheet against uh IT projects in an organization or someone who has the ability to take a look at and Chris Wall's uh situation someone who has the ability to take a look at a bunch of different products
write about them and talk about their effectiveness in a organization that skill is uh kind of you know it's it's pretty tough it's tough to find and the question you know I put out on the last blog post on virtualized geek.com was about the future of the Enterprise engineer and whether or not U we need a lot less deeply skilled highly technical people specifically in enduser organizations so when I I use the term Enterprise throughout this uh Tech talk I'm specifically talking about in user organizations
not the vmwares of the world not the Amazon or the rack spaces but specifically in user organizations typical uh companies non for-profits government organizations corporations that employ uh Engineers to manage and and um to deploy and manage it within a regular within a regular organization so the question is whether or not Enterprises need uh long long term deeply skilled engineers in specific areas so let's say storage for example you know you look at a typical midsize large corporation they may have several uh pure sand administrators
they job is to know frames they're they know capacity management they know uh long configurations they know all these they they know the difference between a vnx and a Vmax whatever that may be uh they're highly skilled and they know uh All About Storage they know uh the how to the number the correct number of drives to be able to get 10,000 iops a minute or whatever the the measurements are for a sand so they're deeply skilled in sand and sour technology but if we think
about where the market is going uh you know we take a look at uh the big vendors the big server vendors d went private because they needed to uh take take a step away from the pressures of the street IBM just recently sold their x86 business uh to Lenovo uh they kind of abandoned uh desktop Computing uh hardware and uh now recently server the backend commodity servers uh Barb darl over at gig home believes that the reason they that they've done that is because of Amazon
you know I don't want to say it's Amazon specifically I want to say it's because of cloud computing uh cloud computing is the consensus future of the Enterprise Computing uh once we work out this whole NSA privacy data security issues which will get worked out there's the Allure of computing on demand Computing for Enterprises it makes sense just like there was a big way for outsourcing uh it operations in general Outsourcing the data center and applications from a SAS perspective kind of make sense for business
to do businesses are not generally in the business of providing IT services but using it as a tool and cloud service providers whether it's infrastructure as a service software as a service platform as a service whatever as a service gives business owners and business uh managers the ability to step away from it or focusing on it and consuming as a utility versus a core part of the business so if that's the long-term future of it how does that affect the typical Enterprise engineer so if I'm
consuming my Erp which today I need a storage administrator I need Network guys I need uh virtualization guys I need compute guys I need Unix guys I need all these Engineers with deep experiences and all these different pillars to you know what I have a internet connection I have my um Network infrastructure and I have connectivity to the cloud and uh IBM which who who would love to do it with their software um acquisition uh salesforce.com uh AWS or whoever is providing my data center my
storage my networking my core networking my uh compute they're doing all that for me and even in some cases the application itself what is the role of internal it there's never going to be a a time where internal it isn't needed at all obviously there's still a network there's still enduser Computing devices there's still an infrastructure to support but the skill mix of the engineers or you know what let's not label them Engineers let's use uh the geek Whispers ter uh term the unicorns uh their
role changes no longer do they need to be versed in uh lung configurations or uh frames or uh multicast or how do I configure a Nexus 7,000 in the future Enterprise that stuff will be managed by someone else you may choose to take a career path where you go to a service provider and you are the the the ccie that manages the Nexus 7000s for you know uh two or three different organiz large organizations or you're the the virtualization SME that uh handles the all the
compute for several 100 organizations or at scale you're the subject manag expert at a service provider but will there the question is or my statement rather is that the Enterprise will no longer need that level of experience at least from a technical perspective for their uh daily it needs now the kind of the focus of the skill set set is shifting from someone who knows a lot about one subject area to someone who knows a little bit about a bunch of different it areas and and
knows a lot about managing a business or operations so no longer uh is my theory that no longer can you be a geek that just puts its head down studies for VC DX the VMware uh expert highest level certification and go into in user organization expecting to receive top dollars it's going to I think it's going to be a skill m match you're going to have this deep level certification knowledge or uh technology knowledge for someone who needs a generalist that has a lot more business
skill who can manage projects who can uh manage vendor relationships um manage virtual help desk you know I I had a great conversation with colleagues the other day talking about uh one of the Dynamics of um managed service providers such as HP uh Enterprise services or censors outs business you know business the the business or operation operations of a it organization changes dramatically when you can no longer tailor your policies around uh internal it and you need to adjust them for for working with a managed
service provider managed service providers need to do things at scale so they can't always customize their processes around your internal processes no matter how well they're they've proven themselves at the end so the enduser organization needs uh unicorns that understand that that can adjust to that environment and can help guide a business through that transition so you know I have to be fa to be fair a lot of you guys you know commented on a blog post you had a lot of great comments specifically around
uh areas such as security I have to you know I have to not agree not not disagree with you that security is one of those areas that you know that that's probably an exception that good or just enough uh high level knowledge of security won't be enough for most Enterprises they'll still need deep security guides so there there'll be pockets in the industry but I think overall the industry needs more unicorns which you know at that point when we get them I guess they won't be
unicorns anymore because it'll be so many of them and less uh specialized skill sets you know what I would love to hear your comments on this topic uh visit us at virtualize decom uh look up the post there's a lot of great comments from guys like Lenny and Rob Nelson they've you know they they as nor as usual they challenge me on some of the outrageous things that I see on the blog uh talk to you guys in episode
