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SaaS adoption has seen the steepest growth curve among many other “as-a-Service” models of the cloud computing family. In fact, cloud computing on the whole has a brilliant future. As the cloud becomes more and more inherent as IT and developer services (read PaaS and hosted DevOps), the future promises to do away with the “as-a-Service” terminology 2013 onwards (predicted by Forrester Research and as published on Forbes). To know more about SaaS and its future please read our past pieces on this here, and here.

Deep rooted SaaS adoption will bring some significant changes that in turn will bring a shift in IT job market. Few of the changes in companies with IT as a support service will be:

1. Business analysts will be in high demand as requirement gatherers, but will be preferred with the capabilities for evaluating SaaS vendors.
2. Data integration specialists will be greater in demand, since use of SaaS models by different functional units (which in probability will be from different vendors) will create data silos that will need integration.
3. Security specialists will be in higher demand because higher use of SaaS and other cloud models will require better analysis of security glitches that may crop up due to opening enterprise data transfer to the SaaS vendor. The demand for security specialists will increase also because cloud vendors will also want to address all the security aspects of their application.
4. Programmers or developers will be in higher demand but not with those enterprises where IT is an enabling tool. Though studies predict that most of the applications will be outsourced to SaaS vendors, many applications which have patented algorithms, especially like those with the domain specific industry leaders, will remain on-premise. This situation in toto will bring down the demand for programmers in companies where IT is a support service.

Changes regarding the talent requirement in IT product companies will be:

1. The demand for developers will soar with more companies taking the plunge into changing their product into SaaS model and startups offering new SaaS and PaaS products.
2. Specialists in mobile technology will be in greater demand as mobile devices become the primary source of access by the SaaS end-users. SaaS vendors will have to ensure high quality mobile access to its customers.
3. Charles Babcock goes a step further to explain on InformationWeek how Salesforce is making every developer a SaaS vendor. Heroku, the Salesforce’s platform for SaaS providers, will allow SaaS suppliers to provide custom applications and add-on services to the Salesforce product line. Salesforce is clearly opening the door for authorized developers to become SaaS vendors in their own right. This too will add to the demand for techies with an entrepreneurial spirit.
4. PaaS is slowly gaining momentum as a suite of application infrastructure available in the cloud. PaaS will also eventually see vertical specific growth. Therefore, we will need more developers here too who can put it all together for the end customers.
5. Since a tectonic shift will be noted with significant increase in demand for developers by SaaS and PaaS vendors, more projects will be created with cloud service providers. Therefore, the project managers will also be in greater demand, but this time more with the tech companies.
6. Similarly the increase in demand for business analysts and security specialists will also be seen more with the cloud service providers than with those companies that are the end-users of IT.

What is your take?

Photo credit: http://www.selectfactoring.co.uk/SMEs-helping-the-job-market