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As the chill wind of recession continues to blow over the IT industry, everyone in the IT industry has to take stock of their skillset: simply put, is anyone interested in your 20 years of mainframe experience any more? With this in mind, CUK attended the “10 Big Things” Global Forum yesterday – a conference of Scotland’s IT leaders addressed by senior executives from the IT industry in the UK and abroad – to find out what skills are likely to be in demand over the coming year. The answer, it seems, is cloud computing and virtualization technology. Almost all of the speakers – which included Accenture research director Kelly Dempski, Cisco strategy director Gordon Thomson and Dell vice-president Stephen Murdoch – picked out cloud computing as the one trend that is set to grow over the coming months – with both externally hosted and “internal clouds” making extensive use of virtualization. So which technologies do you need to be able to blag your way in if you want to call yourself a an expert in the emerging world of the cloud? The platform likely to emerge as one of the biggest players is, perhaps surprisingly, a Microsoft one. The Redmond giant’s Windows Azure platform, whilst still in its infancy, was name-checked as one of the technologies likely to take centre stage, whilst hosting mechanisms such as the “elasticity” players such as SalesForce.com and Amazon’s EC2 were also highlighted. Comfort for budding Plan B-ers was also to be found at the conference, with speakers citing several examples of web startups that have used cloud hosting to “bootstrap” their businesses – the benefit being that the businesses were able to quickly scale up their server capacity as demand grew for their services by simply ticking a box on a control panel. Conversely, if demands tails off, server capacity can be scaled back to save costs. Cloud computing has begun to gain traction in the IT industry in recent months, but it has not been without its detractors. GNU pioneer Richard Stallman has called cloud computing "simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time." Graham Taylor Oct 9, 2009 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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