For a long time, Malaysia has advocated itself as the outsourcing hub of the ASEAN region.
Building its strengths in multi-lingual proficient staff, relatively cheap(er) land and power costs and political stability, Outsourcing Malaysia’s championing of the country’s bid for data centre superiority in the region has succeeded to a significant extent/
Until the recent VMworld conference in San Francisco where VMware’s incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger referred to the data centre of today as a ‘museum of the past’.
Those familiar with the roadmap of VMWare’s virtualisation technologies know that this truth rings louder for those who earn their livelihood working in a data centre.
The 5-day standard benchmark to provision data centres’ storage, disks, security, network connectivity and management confirmation – all of which are necessary to operate an enterprise application on a virtual machine, will soon be reduced to minutes.
“Human middleware” as what the techie industry calls the data centre’s central workforce IT administrators, will soon become redundant.
These people will fast lose their importance in the future of virtualised data centre while companies like VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and Oracle are populating the market with virtualisation solutions that would make HR and hiring managers at data centers smile in their dreams.
But until that future happens whereby all components – configuration, integration with business processes and audit beta tests are automated and equally up to speed, employees in data centre should start to contemplate their value and role if they want to continue to be part of the outsourcing industry.
No doubt it will take some time for us to start seeing a risk to data centre employment.
But the time will come when advanced virtualisation technologies together with software-defined networking, together will allow new applications to run almost instantaneously in data centres.
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IT BYTES BACK! says: IT folks in local data centres might want to start upgrading their skills to ensure longer term marketability.
