Originally Posted by rickair7777

Cloud computing may well be the wave off the future, but it's not going to happen overnight.

Cloud computing might be cheap for the home user, but the security, reliability, and redundancy required for a medium+ size company is not going to come cheap. They will need DEDICATED bandwidth, not shared with everyone in your neighborhood.

Also many companies like doing things THEIR way, not just using a somebody else's idea of generic jack-of-all, master-of-none applications. You can have a custom app on a remote system of course, but you probably still need your own people to manage it.

I worked for a large fortune 500 and we looked into SAP...we spent a year doing business analysis so SAP could work up a price. They quoted us about one BILLION dollars...we passed on that, much as executives liked the idea of outsourcing, our in-house readily customize-able system didn't cost anywhere near that much to maintain.

SAP got greedy IMO...they based their price on a pie-in-the-sky estimate of efficiency gains across the organization which which MIGHT have been achieved with their product. If all the gains did't come through, the company would have been in the red for years.

As fas as networking, there will still be jobs but they will pushed to the extreme ends of the spectrum...you will either be one of a few high-end engineers working for the cloud providers (the cloud doesn't eliminate network requirements, it just moves them around) or a low-end onsite employee who manages LAN wireless nodes...basically a PC technician. The high-end guys will have a MS-EE or equivalent education.

I don't think the internet will replace corporate network trunks...it's too unreliable and unsecure, and can have unpredictable bandwidth issues. Companies will want dedicated primary bandwidth, with the 'net as a possible backup.

If you want a stable future in IT, take up programming. If you're good at it, you can roll with the changes and learn the new languages and paradigms as they arrive.