Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016.  Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Jesse St. Laurent, VP of product strategy, SimpliVity

As Two Data Center Options Emerge in 2016, IT Roles Will Change

As the "traditional" IT infrastructure continues to transform in 2016, roles and responsibilities within organizations will shift as well. The primary reason for this change is that  IT siloes are crumbling, becoming decentralized as the challenges traditionally solved by specialty devices (storage, backup to disk, etc.) are addressed more holistically. As this happens, specialized IT roles and functions will decline. Instead,  IT professionals will take on broader roles,  helping to drive business value through technological innovation.

Traditional IT siloes existed in a world before hyperconvergence or cloud, depending on clunky tools that required constant, manual work. IT organizations spent 80% of their time maintaining systems and only about 20% of their time on new, innovative projects. As IT organizations look to eliminate the traditional IT siloes, we'll see public cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure emerge as the two data center options for the enterprise. IT and data center operators will move toward either one of these options for one main reason: simplicity. The pressure for IT departments to support innovative systems like big data and mobile, while still maintaining day-to-day operations like high availability and security is high. IT is tasked with a more initiatives than they can possibly complete, and when it comes to business innovation, time is of the essence. Given that hyperconvergence is agile, secure, generally cheaper, and allows companies to keep IT in-house, it is often found as an efficient alternative or complement to public cloud solutions.

In 2016 IT will come together to form a stronger team that spends less time on provisioning and troubleshooting and more on implementing technology that adds value to the organization's bottom line. Where they spend their time will flip. IT will spend only 20% of their time on break-and-fix tasks, and will manage applications and policies instead, giving them the freedom and resources to find new ways to innovate and grow the business. Ok, perhaps going from 80/20 to 20/80 in 12 months is wishful thinking on my part, but New Years is always a time to hope!

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About the Author

Jesse brings almost 20 years of IT infrastructure experience to SimpliVity. As the Vice President of Product Strategy, he is intimately engaged with customers, channel partners and SimpliVity's Engineering organization as well as helps shape the product direction and strategy.

Prior to SimpliVity, Jesse served as the CTO at Corporate Technology Inc (CTI), a Systems Integration company worth 100 million+, where he focused on evaluating emerging technologies such as NetApp, 3PAR, Acopia, Riverbed and F5. Jesse frequently speaks at industry events both in the US and internationally.

Jesse holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Brown University.