Managed Services - The Dnell Knell of the IT department?

Is it? I think it could well be.

Is anyone else concerned with managed services and the state of the IT job market? I really think that the market could become a dead duck especially as we are now in recession. I can see less jobs and reduced pay. I dont want to sound like a doom and gloom merchant but with this having MS365 and cloud I am wondering where to go.

I actually really enjoy my job but I can see it all going Pete Tong. I've got a Sys Admin job, work in a great team, but the days of companies paying 5-10 employees to looking after clustering and VMware seem limited. I really think its a time for a lot of us to diversify or at least make sure that we are skilled up.

I am based in the UK BTW.

This is also my first post the next one will be more positive!

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Comments

Turgon

skudge wrote: »

Is it? I think it could well be.

Is anyone else concerned with managed services and the state of the IT job market? I really think that the market could become a dead duck especially as we are now in recession. I can see less jobs and reduced pay. I dont want to sound like a doom and gloom merchant but with this having MS365 and cloud I am wondering where to go.

I actually really enjoy my job but I can see it all going Pete Tong. I've got a Sys Admin job, work in a great team, but the days of companies paying 5-10 employees to looking after clustering and VMware seem limited. I really think its a time for a lot of us to diversify or at least make sure that we are skilled up.

I am based in the UK BTW.

This is also my first post the next one will be more positive!

The bell was tolling 10 years ago, which is why I moved into managed services as an architect a long time ago. Why not do the same. There are still IT department jobs though, and careers but fewer are out and out button pressing activities these days. Technical people are increasingly seen as just resource today so you pays your money and takes your choice.

skudge

Yep its an area I am thinking of looking at, technically though am I way off architect level...

ptilsen

I think "death knell" is an overstatement, but I do think the need for full-time internal IT positions has gone down and will continue to go down as MSPs get more and more efficient and effective. As an MSP engineer/architect in the SMB sector, I can tell you that almost any organization under 100 users or nodes can an absolutely should be run by an MSP. IT departments only make sense for larger organizations, and even there, MSPs are finding more and more ways to compete with the local IT department.

Ultimately, I think a mixture of "cloud"-hosted and MSP-supported local infrastructure is going to dominate the SMB world. Large organizations and big enterprises will still have IT departments in most sectors. We'll all be either working for the datacenter, MSP/consulting firm, technology vendor, or the large enterprise IT department's [xyz technology] team.

blargoe

That's pretty much how I see it going as well.

One of the reasons that I started looking for a different job recently was that it started being less geared toward overall solutions architecture and more toward day to day "keep the lights on" and "get updated to that latest service pack" kind of stuff, which doesn't help position me down the road for placement as an architect when the MSP's become more prevalent. I did end up taking a position with a corporate IT department again, but it should be a situation where I will provide significant input and direction regarding a rapidly growing infrastructure, increase the usage of virtualization, learn new (to me) storage platforms, and be called upon as a "infrastructure generalist" resource when that is needed. If at some point, I have to move to another position to gain more traction on the slippery slope toward high-level architect, I will do so.

ptilsen wrote: »

I think "death knell" is an overstatement, but I do think the need for full-time internal IT positions has gone down and will continue to go down as MSPs get more and more efficient and effective. As an MSP engineer/architect in the SMB sector, I can tell you that almost any organization under 100 users or nodes can an absolutely should be run by an MSP. IT departments only make sense for larger organizations, and even there, MSPs are finding more and more ways to compete with the local IT department.

Ultimately, I think a mixture of "cloud"-hosted and MSP-supported local infrastructure is going to dominate the SMB world. Large organizations and big enterprises will still have IT departments in most sectors. We'll all be either working for the datacenter, MSP/consulting firm, technology vendor, or the large enterprise IT department's [xyz technology] team.

pinkydapimp

I definitely agree with ptilsen as well. Blargoe you are smart to start positioning yourself like you are. thats what i have been doing as well.