Consultants will see the mix of skills their clients need change over the next decade as virtualization, private and public cloud,  mobile computing, and big data become more prevalent in business. But they should not worry about their overall business for the foreseeable future according to EMC Vice President of the Global Residence Practice Jackie Wynn.

Despite optimistic predictions that all IT will go to the cloud in the next few years, actually significant amounts will stay in-house, particularly in large enterprises, and if anything virtualization and private cloud will add more complexity to the data center.

Several factors are contributing to this increased back-end complexity, said the IT veteran, who was an executive at HP for several years before joining EMC.

First, enterprises have collections of legacy systems that will not go into either a public or private cloud and require skills that may become increasingly rare in the next decade. “I still get inquiries about IBM mainframe support,” she says.

Second, virtualization adds an extra layer of operating middleware on systems, and when problems do happen, just identifying the physical server involved can be difficult.

Changing user expectations also will complicate the scenario. “We have a generation coming up who want it now,” she says And they want it on their mobile device of choice, not solely on a Windows or Mac laptop. And when “it” is data from your core systems, and the systems delivering the services are working through the extra layers that virtualization and cloud add to the back-end, meeting those expectations will be demanding.

The combination of public and private cloud services and un-virtualized systems that will make up enterprise computing environments of the near future will also create more rather than less complexity. Saying that cloud computing will make things easier is all well and good, but when your ERP is running on a mainframe or unvirtualized server to maximize performance, your CRM is Salesforce.com, your financials are virtualized in the internal cloud, and you need to integrate the data from them and deliver services to an external sales force using iPads or Android tablets, your internal complexity is not decreasing. And when the salesperson is having lunch with one of your most important customers and needs a guaranteed delivery date on a new order, that service needs to deliver now.

“IT may be viewed as a utility in the future, but people will still want a simplified interface, faster response time, and if something goes down they want it back in five minutes,” Wynn says. “So on the back end that means better knowledge, better resolution times, and better customer service. So I don’t see consulting residencies going away any time soon.”

Services Angle

The complexities of managing mixed infrastructures means that organizations will see some aspects of the enterprise demand considerable IT support. Other departments will be more simple but the management of them all will be the greatest challenge of all.