Taken from Voit’s post, he states, “Subsets of Cisco’s customers and partners are just beginning to cultivate the skills necessary for integrating based on such software boundaries. To get the full benefits…, customers and partners will find they need to extend their systems integration expertise beyond boxes and protocols into unfamiliar areas. At times it will be an uncomfortable transition.”
Notice how he states, customers and partners will find they need to expand their integration expertise into new territories. That is the key to the future, despite the “uncomfortable transition.”
Let’s not fear this transition, but let’s embrace it because without it we cannot unlock the true value of the network. We will need IT leaders to enable and encourage this change. We will need to further break the barriers of traditional silo'd tecnical teams, because ultimately it will mean potential personnel changes on the network teams. This will be similar, but yet much different to the same changes seen across voice, video, and storage teams over the years, simply because application development folks have usually been under a completely different reporting chain than IT infrastructure.
Who will be the first network manager, director, etc. or even someone in a technical sales role to a hire a person that has less of a route/switch background, but more of a network protocols and software development background? How else will we communicate what really needs to be done on a low level technical level to integrate the network with a customer’s CRM or other customer-specific non-off the shelf applications? It shouldn’t be that big of a deal considering companies are usually already spending big bucks on software and application development.
As a network engineer, if you ask to go to a C or JAVA class, what kind of response do you think you’ll get? How innovative is the company you work for and how much do they want to invest in the future of themselves, future of technology, and most important, the future of you?
Jason
@jedelman8
www.jedelman.com