Virtualization, cloud services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) is making it much easier to shift IT infrastructure operations to service providers, and that is exactly what many users are doing.
This trend is being felt the most at in-house data centers in small- to mid-size companies. These firms may be trying to shut down their data centers, or shift a major portion of their workloads to external providers.
Larger firms have been consolidating data centers for years, and even the federal government is shutting down hundreds of data centers in its consolidation push. But these big firms and institutions are optimizing their operations and holding on to them, even as they increase their use of SaaS and cloud services at the margins.
The trend at smaller data centers is a significant career issue. The best jobs may be at service providers with the potential for a career path, instead of at an in-house, small- to mid-size data center.
Hagen Wenzek, the CTO for IPG Mediabrands, is among those making the shift to service providers. He recently moved management of SQL servers and Sharepoint to Avanade, a manage services provider founded by Accenture and Microsoft.
"I can't hire enough experts willing to work for a media company," said Wenzek. IT infrastructure professionals would rather work for a technology company, he said.
Mediabrands' outsourcer improved the performance of technology and dramatically sped up report delivery, said Wenzek. He has shifted his staffing efforts to business analysts, who can work with the data and visualization tools. The analysts can see a career path at IPG, he said.
Wenzek's says his outsourcer is planning to move his servers out of the IPG data center to a third-party cloud environment. That's fine with him. It's up to the outsourcer to determine the best environment for delivering services and lowering costs, he said.
Service providers are growing dramatically. Of the new data center space being built in the U.S., service providers accounted for about 13% of it, but by 2017 they will be responsible for more than 30% of this new space, said Rick Villars, an analyst at IDC.
"Most of the rapid growth is in service providers," which includes hosting, co-location and things such as a Facebook buildout, said Villars.
The service provider growth can be seen in companies like Rackspace, which plans to hire 1,000 new employees over the next two years. It told investors in its 2012 annual report, released this month, that demand is growing, in part, because most smaller companies do not have the IT staff to manage their operations and do not want to spend capital on new equipment.
"We are definitely seeing a trend away from in-house data centers toward external data centers, external provisioning," said Gartner analyst Jon Hardcastle.
Concern about skills was one of the reasons why Gene Berry, the CIO of insurer OneAmerica Companies, decided to transfer his data center operations to a third-party service provider.
OneAmerica's data center took up 25,000 square feet, one full-floor of its Indianapolis-based tower. By June, the firm expects to complete transfer of all its services to T Systems North America. Its in-house data center will be reduced to 2,000 square-feet, mostly for networking, and will be managed by the service provider.
One of the reasons for this decision was staffing, said Berry. The company had about 65 employees in its data center and about 18 different technologies, and in some cases there was only one or two people who had the knowledge to run certain specialized technologies. "That gave us a lot of concern long-term; we didn't have the ability to hire backups for these technical platforms," he said.
Hank Seader, managing principal of the Uptime Institute, said that it takes a "certain set of legacy skills, a certain commitment to the less than glorious career fields to make data centers work, and it's hard to find people to do it."
T Systems has created a private cloud-like, variable-capacity model. If Berry uses less storage or consolidates servers, then costs go down. They plan to modernize their applications.
Most of OneAmerica's data center employees have left the company, and Berry says he has since put put much more focus on application development and working with the business.
Do in-house data centers have a future? "I think only for the really large companies that have scale; for smaller providers, for smaller companies, no," said Berry.
