JOIN USCloud jobs are for real, says EMC honcho
The public cloud market in India is forecast to reach $838 million this year, and expand to $1.9 billion by 2018 (Gartner).
Jobs supposedly being created in this segment are an estimated 100,000 by this year (EMC-Zinnov). Also, Nasscom and Crisil have forecast Big Data to become a $1-billion sector by this year and create up to 20,000 jobs (Big Data — The Next Big Thing). The numbers are impressive, but questions remain as to from where the volumes would materialise. Besides, are these going to be mere entry-level jobs?
Alok Shrivastava, senior director, EMC Global Education Services, is optimistic about the shift. He told Deccan Herald in a recent telephone interaction that job volumes would come as large companies shift their entire businesses to the cloud.
He divided the cloud market into public, private, and hybrid. In public, companies rent their own space in the cloud from IT as a service (ITaaS) companies. In the private model, companies create their own cloud. Hybrid is a mix of both, like when a company keeps its mission-critical facilities in a private cloud and the rest in a public one.
He drew a specific picture of a traditional firm creating high-end jobs in the cloud space. “Let’s take an oil company which has a massive data centre with hundreds of people manning different parts of their information technology (IT) department like databases, storage, networking and so on — all managing the old environment.”
He went on to add, “So when this company decides to go to the cloud...it starts with the business leader getting educated. Next would be the high-level cloud consultant. He would look at the company’s past business and warranties in a future direction and architecture and design for them to develop and deploy a cloud environment.”
Alok says what starts at this level would soon involve all the traditional silos of IT. He says jobs will be created both when companies attempt to deploy and manage the cloud environment, as well as when they port the applications in the old environment to the new.
600-plus institutes
Under Alok’s leadership, the education division of the $24.4-billion, US-based ITaaS giant EMC Corporation has tied up with 600-plus institutes across 21 states in India for its Academic Alliance initiative.
He said the courses they have rolled out are very advanced and not available in the marketplace, including on the MOOC (massive online open course) platforms.
EMC doesn’t charge for the courses. It also certifies the students. But he says individual institutes have been given flexibility on pricing. Alok explained Big Data in simple terms.
“It is essentially data with volume, variety, and velocity or speed. Traditionally you have worked with restructured data. But now more data are being created that does not follow the pattern like more pictures and videos being processed, social media stuff that is running, and the tweets that we sent out.”
Big Data practitioners collate all the data from structured and unstructured sources and process them. Then they make business recommendations based on that, Alok said. He described it as a fairly hot area where jobs are going unfilled because the skills are not there.