Wow, awesome statement there.

I don't see this happening quite how he thinks. Cloud computing is a great way to do backups or store documents (when appropriate) but it will not take over all local IT functions. As for running servers and services, thats already been happening with outsourced IT. Plenty of companies hand their email over to third parties, for instance... But we see the results of this in my niche (network security) every day -- typical scenario: company gets itself broken into digitally, company has no local IT, company is now screwed and scrambling around to hire a consultant. If all the stuffs in the cloud, where are the desktops leaking data? Still at the company site. As long as the company is here, some / many local IT will also be. It can't be helped.

If I'm ever in a meeting where Unisys comes up I'll be sure and remember this guy,

// 16 year technology company veteran. Long memory for asshats.

I'm sure those two folks from India will "sort of" not help when Lurleen from HR accidentally turns her power strip off and then complains that her computer won't boot.

As a Unisys employee, I'm getting a kick out of -- layoffs? What?

Personally, I will never ever out-source my work no matter how big the profit is, because it's damn well not worth it - quality over quantity.

I'd prefer being able to terrorize my subordinates in person. It makes me look more threatening and awesome.

/just kidding about the latter. The former, am not.
// I hope Unisys gets teh haxx0r boot.

Cloud computing isn't going away, but its not going to revolutionize the industry. Hell a lot of businesses are still migrating (slowly) from main-frames (green screens) to x86 servers (web apps).

Meh. Yet another outsourcing boogeyman.

That's the kind of thing you can pull once or twice, until it just becomes common knowledge among management that you need at least *SOME* IT guys on site or you will get royally screwed when (not if) something goes wrong.

Speaking as a man who is on Fark at the moment because the off-site server that hosts the program I'm using has an annoying tendency to crash for five minutes at a time, all I have to say is "Screw cloud computing."

At least when the program is hosted locally there is some work I can do when the internet goes all haywire and starts dropping in and out.

Cload computing, the mainframe of the 21st century.

So I see that we found today's example on how to go full retard.

Sheesh, I haven't even trudged over to the Politics tab yet.

I don't see this happening quite how he thinks. Cloud computing is a great way to do backups or store documents (when appropriate) but it will not take over all local IT functions. As for running servers and services, thats already been happening with outsourced IT. Plenty of companies hand their email over to third parties, for instance... But we see the results of this in my niche (network security) every day -- typical scenario: company gets itself broken into digitally, company has no local IT, company is now screwed and scrambling around to hire a consultant. If all the stuffs in the cloud, where are the desktops leaking data? Still at the company site. As long as the company is here, some / many local IT will also be. It can't be helped.

I have to agree heavily with this. Handing off the keys to "two guys over in India" may be this guy's wet dream, but from a practical standpoint it will never work out this way. This just felt like one big scare tactic/sales pitch by a retarded cock.

/Going through outsourced code at this moment, getting kick, etc.

I used to work at Unisys. One thing I can tell you is that Unisys knows nothing about the direction of technology. That company has been dying for a long time. They have been doing layoffs pretty consistently since 2000.

I work for a company that just pulled back IT after a disastrous outsourcing effort so I'm getting a kick.

/drtfa
//cloud computing is just this years term for outsourcing functions and it has to be managed as such

Hybride: I hope Unisys gets teh haxx0r boot.

Yes, because I and all my co-workers deserve to be out of a job because the idiot technology guy with the company opens his mouth and talks about what every other technology company's been doing for the past 15 years.

Clouds have been around for a long time, someone just found a nifty way to market it. Amazon and Rackspace (and others) are doing good things with hosting server images, but it's not ever going to replace most companies data centers. It may replace the server closet at a small company, but that's it.

The really annoying thing is companies like HP and IBM are trying to sell 'personal clouds' to companies. If you have to support the hardware, network, power, cooling, etc., is it still a cloud? No, it's a damn data center.

"Cloud computing", as with many other "innovations", will have it's place but never live up to all the hype.

My buddy works for Rogers here in Canada.

They have been implementing this, and the manager who pitched it was oblivious to the real costs. They have pretty much completed the changeover and it's pretty much certain it's more expensive in the long run.

...also another buddy of mine is in IT as well and he got laid off last Thursday :(

My dad works for Unisys. He is so close to the majic retirement number (64 I think) He says that he will chain himself to the desk till then.

// LOL just kidding He is ready to accept the inevitable(sic)

B-b-but, computers are the future! We've been telling every kid since WarGames came out to study Comp Sci! The job market there's supposed to grow exponentially until everybody's a computer engineer!

Slu: I used to work at Unisys. One thing I can tell you is that Unisys knows nothing about the direction of technology. That company has been dying for a long time. They have been doing layoffs pretty consistently since 2000.

Smartest and stupidest thing they ever did IMO was spin off their support to its own company in Unisys Technical Services. They figured they could sell off the support sector for capital for the cloud computing. UTS is doing pretty damn well.

In other news, clueless executives will continue to bounce from company to company, scoring ever-larger bonus and severance packages.

I've seen it happen too many times -- once you reach a certain level, it doesn't matter if you're ineffectual or downright malevolent, whether your company thrives on your watch or crashes and burns. There'll always be another company willing to offer you a seven- or eight- or nine-figure package.

When we have any technology discussion at our consultancy first thing we ask is: "What is Unisys headed in the technology?"

Do they still make the Univac?

Hmm....I wonder if this will make it even more difficult for RIAA to figure out how to stop file trading....

jfarkinB: once you reach a certain level, it doesn't matter if you're ineffectual or downright malevolent...

Oh, I could tell you some things about the policies that guy's put into place, but you know...layoffs and rent...

Someone should kick his farking traitor ass to india. that middle management prick. I hope someone puts his ass against the wall when people get really sick of this shiat and revolt.

So, a company that does outsourcing says outsourcing is the future? Wow. Call me when someone from Ford says the horse and buggy is the future. or that they've got a flying car.

Abstruse: Hybride: I hope Unisys gets teh haxx0r boot.

Yes, because I and all my co-workers deserve to be out of a job because the idiot technology guy with the company opens his mouth and talks about what every other technology company's been doing for the past 15 years.
Let me rephrase then: I hope the exec gets the haxx0r boot, not the guys who work there.

Better?

fury211: Someone should kick his farking traitor ass to india. that middle management prick. I hope someone puts his ass against the wall when people get really sick of this shiat and revolt.
I know this is at least a partial troll, but dammit, I agree with you. Kudos.

Cloud computing is the biggest joke of the 2000's.

If your job can be outsourced successfully to India for cheap, you either suck at your job, your job is really easy, or both.

Now there's a lot of people who lost their jobs to outsourcing because companies are short sighted and management can be retarded. I'm not talking about you.

But off the top of my head I could probably name at least 10 people I work with whose jobs could be outsourced for twice the output at half the price.

Hybride: Better?

Much,

My job was outsourced to India, so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies.

\And, yes, they did bring it back after about 8 months
\\Turns out management doesn't like waking up early or staying up late to tell people what to do

IsThisNecessary: The really annoying thing is companies like HP and IBM are trying to sell 'personal clouds' to companies. If you have to support the hardware, network, power, cooling, etc., is it still a cloud? No, it's a damn data center.

Bingo. Same with EMC's 'private cloud.'

A 'cloud' to a networking professional means something very specific: it's a network equivalent of a 'black box.' We either don't know or don't want to describe what's inside. Data goes into the Frame Relay here and comes out here...

From an end-user perspective (and that includes management) much of Enterprise IT services are already a black box.

But the engineers and IT staff? We do want to know how it works. It's not a cloud to us. It is, as you say, our "damn data center." And supporting LAN/WAN infrastructure.

When you make up a new buzzword to describe something I already have, using a term that I already understand to mean something else, I know you're trying to sell me something.

/Clouds are made of vapor.

scotto: Cloud computing is the biggest joke of the 2000's.

Aaaaactually. Cloud architecture is built into the largest corporate datacenters nowadays. Dynamic allocation of resources and instant deployment of new services across the planet.

Service not immediately being used? Shut down the systems or hardware supporting it to save or shift resources.

Service running at capacity? Your cloud orders new hardware. When it's connected at the datacenter the cloud automatically installs an operating system and the services requiring extra capacity.

There is some amazing stuff happening in datacenter automation (which is fueling cloud architecture).

/Picks the brain of a guy at HP Professional Services.

wwwavenger: Service running at capacity? Your cloud orders new hardware.

Oh hell no.

Excellent, now all I have to do is break into one network to steal hundreds of companies worth of information. No more spending hours launching dictionary attacks on different servers for me, now I only need to break one.

I really hope this moran was doing this solely for the press it gets and not because he actually believes that nonsense. Security aside, I really don't see how cloud computing is going to save any established business money (startups maybe).

Weaver95: Hmm....I wonder if this will make it even more difficult for RIAA to figure out how to stop file trading....

I think it'd make it easier for the RIAA. Just send a cease and desist to the network maintainer watch them shut down your accounts.

wwwavenger: scotto: Cloud computing is the biggest joke of the 2000's.

Aaaaactually. Cloud architecture is built into the largest corporate datacenters nowadays. Dynamic allocation of resources and instant deployment of new services across the planet.

Service not immediately being used? Shut down the systems or hardware supporting it to save or shift resources.

Service running at capacity? Your cloud orders new hardware. When it's connected at the datacenter the cloud automatically installs an operating system and the services requiring extra capacity.

There is some amazing stuff happening in datacenter automation (which is fueling cloud architecture).

/Picks the brain of a guy at HP Professional Services.

I came here to say this more or less. I work in a data center and the owner has been having us look into/play around with cloud computing lately. See, we also do shared web/email hosting and that's one of the niche applications where clouds can be useful.

It's not so much that cloud computing is a joke, it's that when the concept started becoming big, people wanted to use it for everything. While you CAN use it for pretty much anything, there are only a handful of situations where implementing a cloud makes sense.

fluffy2097: Weaver95: Hmm....I wonder if this will make it even more difficult for RIAA to figure out how to stop file trading....

I think it'd make it easier for the RIAA. Just send a cease and desist to the network maintainer watch them shut down your accounts.

assuming they knew which accounts to shut down. this set up sounds like it's easy to exploit.

Generation_D: Cloud computing is a great way to do backups or store documents (when appropriate)

I came here to say that. My laptop and backup usb drive were destroyed in a fire yesterday. I'm just so glad my precious digital photos and videos of my children are safely backed up on Xdrive (new window)

At least this guy tells it like it is without using all the usual code words and euphemisms.

AKA Joker: Excellent, now all I have to do is break into one network to steal hundreds of companies worth of information. No more spending hours launching dictionary attacks on different servers for me, now I only need to break one.

A properly implemented cloud should encrypt data before it's stored to prevent this sort of thing.

\This isn't to say it actually happens this way

IsThisNecessary: Clouds have been around for a long time, someone just found a nifty way to market it. Amazon and Rackspace (and others) are doing good things with hosting server images, but it's not ever going to replace most companies data centers. It may replace the server closet at a small company, but that's it.

The really annoying thing is companies like HP and IBM are trying to sell 'personal clouds' to companies. If you have to support the hardware, network, power, cooling, etc., is it still a cloud? No, it's a damn data center.

This.

I'm so damned tired of hearing about "the cloud." Cloud computing has been around for a long time, somebody just slapped the name on it and is marketing it as scalable provisioning.

Somebody still has to do desktop support. When tech like VDI takes over, somebody will STILL have to manage the images, somebody will STILL have to do end-user support. I can see support staff numbers being cut, but honestly, anybody who stays a tech for more than a few years either doesn't belong in the industry or doesn't have the drive to move into a higher position where job security is a perk.

And all that high-end infrastructure being marketed as a cloud? Somebody needs to be paid top-dollar to set up that fancy crap and keep it running. Two guys from India aren't going to be able to provide top-to-bottom IT services for one company, let alone entire organizations with multiple sites and specific needs. Small business doesn't have near the online presence or capabilities it could, and once they do, they'll need somebody on call and onsite.

The cloud isn't the end-all be-all for service providers. Far from it. Sure, it will be great for automation when all is said and done, but somebody needs to admin this stuff - it doesn't just pop out of nowhere. The ones who are going to cash in on the industry's move towards "the cloud" are the ones who can adapt to keep up with the direction of employment in the US while keeping their skills updated.

/MCITP
//EST
//EA soon...

sluck604: Hell a lot of businesses are still migrating (slowly) from main-frames (green screens) to x86 servers (web apps).

My company isn't. The mainframe is likely going to be at this company longer than anyone currently employed here.

There are two clouds, and it's important to distinguish what type of "cloud computing" (I hate that buzzword) we're talking about. In all cases, cloud computing, at least in part, refers to a balanced and distributed architecture. This is very useful for IT pros, since it simplifies demand planning and helps maximize resource utilization. Good stuff.

But then there's the dark cloud: you don't deploy the cloud. Google or Amazon or Microsoft does. This is the "real" sense of cloud computing- where the deployment details on your server architecture diagram are replaced with "a cloud" the universal symbol for "I don't know what happens here".

This is a bad idea for all but small startups. It's a great way to get a lot of computing power with only a little capital, but it poses all sorts of problems for large, established companies. It's a great way to get your organization off the ground, but when you're off the ground, you really need your own infrastructure, and all the expenses that go with it.

So I'm a freshman in college and haven't declared a major yet. I'd like to do something at least remotely related to IT because that's what I'm interested in. I'm not great at math (doesn't help that the grad students they have teach the subject don't give a damn about whether you learn anything... they just want their degrees) and I hear about programming jobs and the like being outsourced to India en masse. Because of this I'm considering declaring a major in MIS (Management Information Systems) and trying to become either a middle manager type or a technical writer. I know these two occupations are only tangentially related to IT and that the time I will spend in front of a computer will likely be very little (and that I'll have to sell my soul if I become a manager). It seems like these types of jobs are the ones requiring physical presence (esp. being a technical writer -- I can't see that one being outsourced too easily, correct me if I'm wrong). I'm just curious if any farkers have any input on this. Any suggestions or criticism would be greatly appreciated.

The Icelander:
A properly implemented cloud should encrypt data before it's stored to prevent this sort of thing.
\This isn't to say it actually happens this way

Even if that is true nothing is perfect and storing that much info in one spot is asking, nay advertising for trouble. Look at what happens when a single retailer loses control of a credit card cache. Now amplify that x100 if a couple "Fortune500" companies get their cloud hacked. The potential for damage is very high, too high IMHO.

Hueg_Redd: Because of this I'm considering declaring a major in MIS (Management Information Systems) and trying to become either a middle manager type or a technical writer.

Aim high...

But seriously, find something you enjoy doing. I took a pretty round about route to the career I'm in now. I started out doing CE/CS, hated it, got a degree in IT security, and ended up working support at a colo/web hosting company. Most people consider support jobs in IT to be the shiat work and in general I think they're right. But the company I work for is fantastic. I'm learning more at work than I ever did in school. The best part of it is I love my job. I look forward to going to work.

/find a job you love.
//it may not be the job you think you want.

I could see where if you wanted to rent a server to do testing of your application before it went live, cloud computing would make sense. Article in the Sept. 7, 2009 InfoWorld which listed 12 different cloud computing vendors and included pricing. For apples to apples, let's say you were looking for a Red Hat server.

Unisys declined to state pricing for that article. They only deal in a year contract. They give a 99.9 % uptime guarantee. (That's 8.76 hours of downtime in a year). Richard Marcello stated they are using 2 guys in India.

Rackspace is located in San Antonio. They charge 1.5 cents an hour for 256 Mb RAM, 10 Gb disk space. They give a 100% uptime guarantee (and can back that up BTW). Somehow they are able to employ Americans charging just over a penny an hour.

Rot in hell Richard Marcello. You can't even give your fellow Americans a fraction of a penny or so much as a shot. I hope that the shareholders realize how much cost savings they could share eliminating your job and you'll be out in the street like everybody else.

Hueg_Redd: So I'm a freshman in college and haven't declared a major yet. I'd like to do something at least remotely related to IT because that's what I'm interested in. I'm not great at math (doesn't help that the grad students they have teach the subject don't give a damn about whether you learn anything... they just want their degrees) and I hear about programming jobs and the like being outsourced to India en masse. Because of this I'm considering declaring a major in MIS (Management Information Systems) and trying to become either a middle manager type or a technical writer. I know these two occupations are only tangentially related to IT and that the time I will spend in front of a computer will likely be very little (and that I'll have to sell my soul if I become a manager). It seems like these types of jobs are the ones requiring physical presence (esp. being a technical writer -- I can't see that one being outsourced too easily, correct me if I'm wrong). I'm just curious if any farkers have any input on this. Any suggestions or criticism would be greatly appreciated.

It doesn't matter WHAT you do as much as how you do it.

Don't piss off anybody important. Show the right people that you're knowledgeable and eager to learn. And don't slack off, I imagine where I'd be if I didn't spend my first 3 years of college drinking and chasing pussy.

Unisys? Now there's a brain trust! I am surprised they even survived after merging Sperry and Burroughs, but not keeping either of those names. By creating a new name, they became a leviathan of a company no one had ever heard of, and had to spend zillons on advertising just to introduce themselves.

Fark them. Worked with/for them in various capacities over the last three or four years, finally free from their grasp. Management is topheavy, keep cutting quality engineers for cost, typical shiat. Each time I went back, I was hoping "new department/new attitude," but that was a mistake. Never again.

The name recognition is all that carries them anymore. If their clients knew about the sub-par cost-cutting shiatty quality they were pumping out, they would turn tail. Accountants making technical decisions is never a good thing.

Honest Bender

Hueg_Redd: Because of this I'm considering declaring a major in MIS (Management Information Systems) and trying to become either a middle manager type or a technical writer.

Aim high...

But seriously, find something you enjoy doing. I took a pretty round about route to the career I'm in now. I started out doing CE/CS, hated it, got a degree in IT security, and ended up working support at a colo/web hosting company. Most people consider support jobs in IT to be the shiat work and in general I think they're right. But the company I work for is fantastic. I'm learning more at work than I ever did in school. The best part of it is I love my job. I look forward to going to work.

/find a job you love.
//it may not be the job you think you want.

A degree in IT security from where?

Honest Bender:
Aim high...


hmm. Yeah I know those two goals aren't exactly lofty but I just have been trying to consider what isn't likely to be outsourced over the next couple of decades. Job security is what I'm concerned with. I don't want to be rich, I just want to live comfortably. A support job sounds interesting but, like you said, most consider it to be shiat work so that's why I hadn't considered it prior to now. That certainly seems like something that would be hard to outsource, though. I guess you'll always have people screwing things up, no matter how good the tech. is or how well trained they are. I worked at a computer repair place for a couple of years in high school and I guess that's comparable. I enjoyed that. Much to ponder... thanks for the input