Resellers face skills battle against startups and IT shops

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. 

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