The rush of Australian businesses to embrace cloud has driven companies in the channel to launch services to meet growing demand, but as Australia’s appetite for the cloud grows, suppliers face a skills crunch that may limit their ability to capitalise on new opportunities.
Growth in cloud is fuelling demand for skills in the newer management disciplines of Agile development and DevOps, along with the need for coding skills in languages and platforms such as Ruby on Rails, Python and JavaScript.
Overarching these is an ever-growing demand for cyber security skills. All of these capabilities are essential in building out comprehensive cloud solutions, particularly when service providers are expanding beyond basic infrastructure-as-a-service, backup and disaster recovery.
Sydney-headquartered Brennan IT has been promoting and selling its own cloud services since 2008. As its offerings grow, so too does the managed services provider’s appetite for skills. Lyncoln de Mello, Brennan IT’s practice director for communications and cloud, says the firm is investing to grow capabilities in fields such as reference architectures and virtual machine management, and in specific technologies such as PowerShell and Perl to drive efficiency gains in its cloud environment.
But Brennan IT, like many local channel businesses, face increasing competition with both start-ups and Australia’s largest employers in the war for cloud talent. Skills around Agile and DevOps methodologies in particular have proven popular in the start-up community, and are often the basis for many born-in-the-cloud companies, Meanwhile, banking and finance companies in particular have adopted Agile and DevOps within their service delivery functions.
“One of the key things that we are seeing both from an in-house and reseller perspective is DevOps,” says Peter Noblet, senior regional director for information technology at recruitment firm Hays. “Another is the security aspect of it – the technical capability, but also around understanding the impact of security.”
Noblet says cloud security certifications are in particularly high demand, such as CSA’s Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge, which have now been joined by ICS2’s Certified Cloud Security Professional and Cloud School’s Certified Cloud Security Specialist.
“The challenges within this are around data sovereignty – where and how it is held,” Noblet says. “There are some local regulations that companies must adhere to, and knowledge of that is going to be key in data protection. And third is the API space, because that is the way that applications are being deployed. People who understand that will be in high demand.”
The API space in particular is a crucial area: it is through APIs that cloud services can be integrated together. Often this work is done by users, but according to Jonathan Stern, regional vice president for ANZ at API technology provider MuleSoft, this work is also now being picked up by partners, particularly newer cloud integration organisations.
“The partners who are getting on board with this are finding it is not just the provision of integration technologies – they are really getting much closer to business transformation,” Stern says. “At the moment it is the newer ones who are ahead. The others are taking a bit of time to turn and face the right way.”
Stern says new and emerging cloud integration partners represent a new group of competitors in the channel – both for business and for skills – as many were born in the cloud.
Next: acquisition to strengthen skills
One example is Bulletproof, which began life as a hosting provider and today positions itself as an end-to-end cloud services company with strengths in consulting and implementation services. Last December, Bulletproof acquired cloud consulting firm Pantha, primarily to get access to its pool of DevOps skills. Bulletproof’s chief executive Anthony Woodward says DevOps skills are essential in building a cloud-based business.
“As a hosting company, we have a lot of skills around the infrastructure that you need to build up to run a good e-commerce platform, for example,” Woodward says. “A lot of those software components are now being encapsulated in software packages like Magento and Sitecore, and what that means is you need to understand how to put the infrastructure together to underpin that.
“But to do that right you actually need to know that application platform upside down and back to front. We look for expertise around the underlying cloud platform and also specific knowledge about these popular applications platforms.”
Woodward says that people with DevOps skills think about cloud as software, instead of thinking about cloud as infrastructure. This is essential in designing capabilities such as auto-scaling, where applications themselves manage the cloud resources they need.
A changing environment
One exemplary ‘born in the cloud’ integrator is Cloud Sherpas, a global partner of Salesforce.com, ServiceNow and Google, which is headquartered in the United States and has offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Ian Goodwin, Cloud Sherpas’ head of cloud advisory, says the company began life as an implementer of cloud solutions but has shifted into an advisory and integration role.
“We have a lot of expertise around data and integration architecture, which is obviously a key area for cloud,” Goodwin says. “And then we have some of the best and brightest people from a technical perspective on each of those respective platforms anywhere in the world.”
Goodwin predicts the area of highest demand into the future will be software architecture skills, as clients seek partners who can bring together internal and external systems.
The move to cloud is also being accompanied by a desire from larger users to simplify the management of their internal infrastructure, and that has led to growing interest in software-defined networking, as part of an overall shift to software-defined data centre architecture.
According to Jason Brouwers, Cisco’s director of partner services for ANZ, the shift to a software-defined environment creates opportunities for partners to provide more comprehensive managed network services for clients. For Cisco, this would be based on its application-centric infrastructure (ACI) architecture.
“It’s actually gives them more control over how they manage the customer’s applications on a Cisco network,” Brouwers says. “It gives them a broader scope to sell more services, so they can be more effective at delivering an end-to-end solution for their customers, in that they can control things at the application level. So this could be a good foot in the door for them to go and work more on their customer’s applications.”
But, of course, getting that foot in requires reskilling, and to that end Brouwers says Cisco is working to educate partners on ACI, particularly in relation to sale of its Nexus 9000 series switch, and through the Cisco software partner program it will launch in August. Cisco is living and breathing this evolution from infrastructure to software. At its recent partner summit in Montreal, one of Cisco’s loudest messages was that it now sees itself as a software company, and wants partners to follow suit.
“Once they get the message around ACI, it very quickly allows them to coral their resources to get educated and understand what they need to put in place to start conversations with their customers,” Brouwers says.
Demand for coding skills
But the current battle for software skills may be nothing compared to what is to come. With enrolments in computer science and engineering degrees in decline, the number of future workers with software skills is likely to fall.
Numerous initiatives have been created to try and stimulate interest of younger Australians in learning coding skills, such as the primary school-based Code Club initiative and the Young ICT Explorers program run by SAP. Microsoft has also invested in a number of student-related initiatives, including its global Imagine Cup student developer contest, and the DreamSpark program, which provides developer tools to students at no cost.
Sarah Vaughan, director of developer evangelism and experience at Microsoft Australia, says these initiatives are very much about meeting future needs. “We don’t see there being a supply challenge now, but we see that being more and more problematic as fewer and fewer graduates come out from university,” Vaughan says. “IDC is predicting that 77 percent of the jobs in five to 10 years will be digital roles, so you will at least need a rudimentary understanding of coding.
“Coding is the language that will drive jobs and productivity and innovation. If you don’t have those skills the prospects of employment and a great career are limited.”
Breakout: Vendors promote nation's STEM skills
The problem of declining science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills in Australia is gaining increased attention, from both government and the private sector.
A recent report by the Australian Industry Group outlined the scale of the issue. It found that while STEM skills are “increasingly important for the competitiveness of the Australian economy”, Australia is under-performing internationally compared with STEM-strong countries. “Employers report significant difficulties recruiting technicians and trades workers with STEM skills.”
Ai Group blamed an “un-coordinated and non-systemic” approach to collaboration between schools and industry, and said that collaboration between industry and universities “is low by international comparison”.
A number of major voices in the IT industry are seeking to redress the balance. Cisco is putting its money where the skills gap is by investing up to $31 million to address the shortage of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills in Australia. In March, it announced AUSTEM 2020, a five-year investment program expanding to train more than 100,000 Australian tertiary and school students in STEM areas.
The program includes $21 million in the Cisco Networking Academy program, which will use public-private partnerships with not-for-profit higher education providers and schools to train around 100,000 students in “industry-relevant, job-ready technology skills”. Ken Boal, Cisco’s ANZ boss, says: “The Australian economy is in transition, and there has never been a more important time to invest in the programs that will equip students with the skills they need to secure the jobs of the future.”
Microsoft is also trying to lift the profile of STEM skills among school children. In May, the software giant partnered with The Smith Family, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), the Australian Business and Community Network, and the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences to launch #WeSpeakCode.
Some 7,000 students from across the nation participated in the week-long event. In Sydney, more than 800 students heard from Microsoft Australia managing director Pip Marlow and minister for communications Malcolm Turnbull. “We need to expose more students to coding so they are inspired to create, build and develop new technologies rather than just being passive users of it,” said Turnbull.
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