Future of IT Engineers

I was reading a consulting report from one of the consulting gurus on the said topic. The future of the IT lies in what the CEO's of the big companies think and expect. From the report, it was clear that the CEOs of fortune 100 companies are expecting the following two mantras from IT world.

1. Virtualization
2. IT as services

Virtualization - The concept of decoupling the software [mainly the operating system] from the underlying hardware is called virtualization. By adding more resources to a server, mainly the CPU, storage and memory [aka RAM], more images of operating systems can be brought up on the same machine to run several services. This adds more pressure on the hardware vendors because they have to think about eliminating the SPOF - Single Point Of Failure from the hardware perspective.

IT as services - Big companies do not want to spend more money on maintaining an inhouse IT team to build and maintain a custom application. They wanted to go for a packaged solution [like ERP] or outsource the maintenance and enhancement services to a big vendor.

By the virtue of the above two requirements, we are referring to two set of skills opposite to each other.

For building a packaged solution [be it hardware or ERP], the companies will be expected the creamy layers from the top Technology colleges. If i am a CEO and i have to make decision in this, i will not settle for anyone with an IQ less than 180 [infact, that is what the GOOGLE team is doing right now].

For the IT services, it is all about understanding some badly written code sometime back and to make it work by providing a temporary fix. More bugs will be introduced and more scope for improvement will be created in the due course.

I dont expect a very good skill level is required for this work. The big companies like Accenture, Wipro, Infosys and now TCS had already started recruiting B.Sc and BCA graduates for this "services" work. They will probably not require any more engineers in future [who will comply with the minimum salary restrictions imposed by most of the Grade A colleges].

Now, more than the question about the future of IT, it is question about the future of engineers in IT. Leave alone the fresh graduates, what about the engineers who already spent quite some time in the IT world and who did let go any good chance in their own engineering field.

In the similar lines of the law of energy - "The amount of work / jobs always remain constant. It only gets transformed from one form to the other". The statement is true, but should an axe be used for cutting butter?

...bright