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Comment by couradical | Hacker News Reader

The thing is - How do you develop a standardized toolchain for work? Who decides what the tradeoffs of a particular ERP stack are, how do you integrate it with your accounting system, who controls data flow in your company? You still need people to make those decisions, and that is what corporate IT is about - it's about designing, implementing and refining processes, not really technology. The tech is a tool, not the be all end all.

I think that "cloud" will be a definite bonus to the SMB shop, and provide a wonderful amount of spare capacity to enterprise shops, but I can't foresee "the cloud" replacing in-house IT completely.

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> You still need people to make those decisions, and that is what corporate IT is about - it's about designing, implementing and refining processes, not really technology. The tech is a tool, not the be all end all. I think that "cloud" will be a definite bonus to the SMB shop, and provide a wonderful amount of spare capacity to enterprise shops, but I can't foresee "the cloud" replacing in-house IT completely.

But it will replace the major costs of corporate IT - technical resources services. For example, today a large corp (let's use Gazprom as an example) will contract a big IT services company (let's use Wipro for example) to manage their servers. This specific AWS service can in theory replace a large Citrix farm. When I was internal at SAP for example, every employee had access to their very own remote windows desktop, which had the basic office software on it required to do anything they could do on their laptop. The overall idea of cloud isn't the technology, it's that it's shared services.

You can't. Every business over a certain size will still need in house people that understand their problems. All Amazon, or any cloud providers for that matter, are doing is abstracting away IT services from the bottom up.

Need a server? click a button Message queue? click. Database? click. Virtualised Desktops? clicky-clicky. Virtual Tape Drive? (I'm as surprised as you are).

You're still going to need people who need to know what each one of those things means to your business. But in-house enterprise IT today still consists of lots of people (and payroll) who put things in racks, re-image desktops, restore SQL Backups, install custom software and give the tapes to the dude in the motorcycle helmet...

In the medium term the cloud won't replace IT. It will however redefine it to the point that the 'spare capacity' that you mentioned will be seen like an amusing anachronism.

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