The tech industry is currently in the midst of some monumental shifts. First of all, hardware is changing. Flash and NVMe are changing how we write to disks, opening up all sorts of opportunities for hyper-converged architectures, not to mention the ability for applications to write much faster to disk.

Tech Industry is Changing

Cloud is also beginning to be widely understood and adopted. Large organizations are embracing SaaS, allowing the infrastructures for mission critical applications such as email to be completely managed by veteran tech corporations such as Microsoft. At VMworld, VMware announced that its Cloud Foundation software (vSphere, VSAN, and NSX) can be run as a service from public clouds, starting with the IBM cloud. They are so cloud-friendly now that AWS and Github both had booths on the show floor at VMworld.

Our world isn’t changing; it has already changed.

What does that mean for the people who work in the IT industry? For example, if you’ve spent your entire career architecting and managing Exchange in your organization’s data center, what do you do when the decision is made to move everything to Exchange Online?

What does it mean if you are nearing the end of a hardware contract for your data center? Should you plan your move to the cloud? And if so, which delivery model should you adopt? Or should you continue to purchase hardware, perhaps invest in HCI?

IT Industry – Tech Industry – It depends

I don’t have the answers, because as with most questions in IT the answer is it depends.  My strong advice to find solid ground as these shifts occur is to stay connected to your community. Times like these are when programs like VMware vExperts, EMC Elect, Cisco Champions, etc. come in handy. Follow Tech Field Day events. Connect with these groups of highly engaged individuals who care about the technologies we’re working with, as well as  new technology that is threatening to disrupt things. Read blogs, listen to podcasts, make a home lab to test things out. Then share what you’ve learned back with the community.

As everything shifts, it will continue to be crazy and crumbly for a while. But we have to go through this transition in order to get where we’re supposed to be: the next technical pivot point.

How will you survive until we get there?