Page 161 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

IT REORG ANIZES

an application and a particular piece of hardware, making the
application mobile and capable of being migrated to differ-
ent kinds of hardware.
How the application has performed at its most recent
server host will be the answer sought by every IT administra-
tor responsible for the smooth operation of the data center.

Jason Hoffman, CEO of the six-year-old virtual data center
provider Joyent, in San Francisco, says that the system admin-
istrator will need to become a programmer in order to survive.
“The system administrator as something distinct from pro-
grammers will collapse,” he predicted in an interview. A vir-
tual data center draws on the resources of infrastructure
providers and co-location service providers to give customers

cloud resources through an easy-to-use front end.
An example of what he means is evident at National Re-
tirement Partners, a San Juan Capistrano, California, firm,
where the system administrator now programs in the Apex
business logic language supplied by Salesforce.com. With Apex,
the system administrator can now do in the Force.com cloud
something that he would not have had the skills to do as a San
Juan Capistrano system administrator: he can modify the stan-
dard Salesforce application so that it suits investment advisors,

the professionals that he is trying to capture in the National
Retirement Partners investment advisor network. That is, in-
stead of being concerned with an on-premises server, this IT
manager has produced code that helps 150 investment advi-
sors make better use of their Force.com cloud environment.
The cloud can also reorganize IT development teams. In-
stead of developing software for highly specific proprietary

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