IT in 2015 and beyond

For those at the helpdesk with some in depth knowledge in systems and a bit of knowledge elsewhere. Where do we go to set ourselves apart? It is getting a bit saturated and others are looking for the road less traveled to sidestep the action. Caveat, I understand if you are a rockstar you will succeed no matter what. This is serious and for a bit of fun and thinking.

A guy had mentioned slaesforce earlier. Any other ideas?

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jleydon82

Salesforce is the bomb. What a great platform and something valuable to get into. I've hired a few Salesforce Admins and Devs - all of which were making well over $100k salary. So keep that in mind. However not all companies use it. And the ones that use it that pay well are REALLY using it. I had used Salesforce for more than a CRM. I had it running to integrate HR, Accounting, Inventory, Customer Service, Sales Reps - everyone was in the system. You could track things so well that you could pull up the recruiting process to onboard a new rep, their contact with customers to generate quotes, all the way to once the order is placed you can check when they called in for support on an item and any warranty/repair related to the product.

I bring up this detail in salesforce because a lot of people think it is a fluffy CRM but it is really powerful and it is a great field to get into.

Aside from that, you are right - you do want to be in a not so saturated market - the road less traveled - to help your career. What you should keep in mind is that IT is a very broad field. You have to stay up on skills and always be learning. The concern I personally have with Salesforce is the concern of where will it be in 10 years. You hope that they continue to build the product and it thrives - but if it ever fails what now? I don't think it will happen but unfortunately if it did your Salesforce skill set may not be as valuable somewhere else working on a different technology.

What you should think about are some of the other technologies that are booming. Also, what type of business do you want to work for? In enterprise level businesses I see the following trends: Private Cloud servers (VMware vCloud, Azure, Amazon EC2), Enterprise SAN Storage, Automation, Virtualization.

These are big fields on their own but in most companies people can make a pretty great career specializing in something like SANs. Where you focus primarily on storage and become an expert on it. These are what are needed now and will guarantee you jbos with larger companies. Also as things change - I believe these topics will just keep growing. You just have to be prepared to always be learning.

joemc3

Great reply jleydon82, I was hoping this thread would help those who are still deciding and those who don't have a ton of credentials. I am in the boat of being over 30 no college degree, but could get one if need be. When you project spending up to 4 years attaining a degree or cert up a bit and get experience.

Some of us with helpdesk experience who want to branch out and are late to the game can't afford to waste any time. 4 years is a lot, from this forum I have seen members make great strides in their career. One that comes to mind is Irish angel. She had a post from 09 about her new part time job in It. Look at where she is now. No doubt she is some form of alien with an iq of 400. I am hoping to get a feel on what is out there. I didn't know sales force existed until today.

I have a foot in the door and decided what door to open. As far as having passion for your career, I agree. Sometimes you aren't aware of what are passion is until you know what is out there. I am approaching my mcsa 7 after that...who knows.

jleydon82

The problem sometimes is the environment. Though other times it is just the person. I worked for a large enterprise on Help Desk when I started but after a year I moved to desktop support. I then moved into Exchange Administration about a year and 1/2 after so I made pretty big jumps. It was mostly because of relationships I worked on with other departments and I spent a lot of time learning. What I personally did was anytime I had to escalate an issue to a higher tier, I would learn why things happened and what they meant. I spent a lot of time understanding Outlook and how it behaved with Exchange - at least on a theoritical level - where I was able to escalate tickets and document what I thought was the solution. In most cases I was right and I never had tickets rejected back to me, which was common in this work environment.

As soon as a project with another team opened up I jumped on it and I kept the same attitude throughout my career. I personally love this field but I know others in it for years (I started in 2001) that hate it, but again they perhaps do not feel like working hard at advancing themselves personally - and could potentially just be in a bad environment.

One thing I like to do is waste time on Pluralsight. I pay monthly for memberships and often watch videos on topics I know nothing off just to go through the beginner learning of that software/platform. THat way I get a basic overview and see if I am interested in it.

kly630

I worked in depth with SAP Business One for about 2 years and sugarCRM for another. SAP is an entry level ERP, just a step above quickbooks and peachtree, but it's a pretty powerful piece of software because it integrates practically every business function and outputs financial statements. After about a year of working there, I could work my way through basic setups for most companies including A/R, A/P processes, inventory tracking, etc. sugarCRM was interesting too as it seemed like a powerful toolset modeled after salesforce in many ways, just with a free version and onsite capabilities.

I think it doesn't really matter what ERP or CRM you work with, but getting base knowledge with business software like an ERP and a CRM would be pretty helpful. I've thought about salesforce or microsoft dynamics for a while too to augment my skills set a bit. This only really works though I think if you get in on an implementation project for a company that intends to use this management software. Also, in the new land of cloud, I'd really be careful picking some of the older names like SAP and oracle, especially on the ERP side.

Chadius

I wasn't up to speed with Salesforce, so I did a bit of research. The shocking thing to me, is that they have not turned a profit since the inception in 1999. Weird. 12000 employees but no profit?

jleydon82

I imagine they are reinvesting into their technology / marketing and are operating without a profit. Why - no idea I can't find out. But they are bringing in a ton of money and have quite an impact on the market.

But as kly630 said. If you learn SugarCRm, Salesforce, SAP - you can get into the right ERP knowledge which is pretty important if that is what you want to get into.

robS

kly630 wrote: »

.... SAP is an entry level ERP, just a step above quickbooks and peachtree...

Um..disagree. SAP is a behemoth of ERPs - it's used to manage billions of dollars per year of revenue across pretty much every major sector. I've never seen someone with good SAP experience out of work. Whether you're doing ABAP coding, BASIS (tech ops) support or functional consultancy in one or more SAP modules, it's a great technology to have experience in. It's possible you were using a simple implementation of it, and there are certainly some newer ERPs and CRM systems with better functionality and orders-of-magnitude better interfaces, but I wouldn't write SAP off as entry level!

SAP also integrates quite nicely with SF.com via interfaces.

With regard to sf.com, it's a great technology and with the force.com platform it's being used for much more than just CRM. In fact there's a great IT development and ITSM toolset called ITinvolve built on force.com.

Service Now is another platform (this time one that started out as an ITSM tool) which is expanding the other way into business applications.

I think platforms such as these are the future. Other things to think about are the devops practices (agile development, continuous build & integration, infrastructure as code, orchestration and scripting tools). There's so much possibility out there, I'd just be wary of specialising too much too early.

kly630

robS wrote: »

Um..disagree. SAP is a behemoth of ERPs

You're correct, my sentence is missing the ever important "This version of SAP". SAP Business One is entry level, but actually has 30K implementations out there so it's got more than a few users now. It's very different from R/3, which is what I was hoping to convey. But even at their entry level, there's tons and tons of solid ERP knowledge to be had for people who get a chance to work on a project.

I think the big point here is that ERP and CRM knowledge are pretty important because they're what connects IT to the business and makes IT so important. Having enough knowledge to run/work with these programs will definitely aid in your perspective and prospects.

robS

kly630 wrote: »

You're correct, my sentence is missing the ever important "This version of SAP". SAP Business One is entry level, but actually has 30K implementations out there when I was working it. It's very different from R/3, which is what I was hoping to convey. But even at their entry level, there's tons and tons of solid ERP knowledge to be had for people who get a chance to work on a project.

Ah apologies - I misunderstood. That'll teach me not to read it twice before replying...