The Daily Network Monitor

Well, it’s not all as earth-shaking as that, but I’m getting tired of grabby headlines that loudly announce or predict the death of this or that.  Starting with disco, hardly anything is as dead as people like to say.  Cultural trends and technologies alike are much more prone to mutate and evolve or get reborn or remixed than to actually die. (Has anybody else noticed that the Apple Newton didn’t quite die, but got reborn first as the Palm Pilot and then the iPod Touch, and you can bet next week’s MacWorld will give birth to more…)

So you can understand my mixed feelings at Carolyn Duffy Marsan’s well-reasoned but poorly-headlined piece in Network World, The IT department is dead, author argues, which reviews Nicholas Carr’s book of the moment, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google.  You may remember Carr for asking Does IT Matter? in his 2004 book of the same title.

IT isn’t dead, IT departments are not dead, and IT professionals are not dead.  Far from it.  In fact, I think they’re all feeling much better and might even get up and go for a walk.

Now, that said, this certainly doesn’t mean that IT departments are going to be able to sit around and do what they’ve always done for years and get away with it.  They will adapt or they will in fact die.  To borrow one of Carr’s analogies, just because few if any businesses today generate their own power on-site does’t mean that there’s no market for power or people skilled in generating it.  Those professionals just had to make some adjustments in their skills and career paths.

What Carr and many others - notably Google - are getting at is that lots of parts of IT are getting commodified (that means made into a commodity, not thrown in the commode), getting turned into utilities and getting outsourced or shared.  The role of a small or mid-sized business IT pro is going to evolve in two ways because of this:

1. In-house IT will have to get skilled at managing the IT utilites: they will have to select, monitor and integrate rather than provide these kinds of services themselves

2. In-house IT will become more and more concerned with applications and business results and less concerned with infrastructure and connectivity

I think you’ll agree that neither trend will do much to reduce the demand for in-house IT.  Web-based software sold on the ASP model hasn’t put IT managers out on the street, it’s just given them new and even more interesting and valuable responsibilities.  If that’s dead, then I’ve got a deathwish, for sure.

I was wandering around various job sites just to see what kinds of network management career opportunities are available. I was looking for job requirements where SLAs are defined as well as what level of experience was required. And while I did find a lot of opportunities where SLAs were defined, another interesting aspect became apparent, which I discuss below.

While the normal requirements for Cisco certifications, VoIP, QoS and routing, server monitoring experience were required, one thing that stood out was the need for experience with network monitoring tools. Of course the big-boys, HP, IBM and CA were mentioned but even more surprising to me was how many positions defined a requirement for experience with WhatsUp Gold.

While I am an Ipswitch employee, it was very interesting to see the number of positions that required WhatsUp experience as a requirement. Below is one job description that was particularly interesting (names have been deleted to protect the innocent):

Dynamic company is currently seeking Telecom VOIP Administrator. Candidate will assist in managing WAN connectivity to 50+ remote sites; participate in 24×7 on-call rotation; manage vendor relations; provide 2nd tier support to helpdesk staff; assist in managing existing Cisco IP Telephony solution and installing solution at new sites; document WAN and LAN, keeping documentation up-to-date.

Technical Experience:
Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visio, Active Directory, Cisco Networking, EIGRP, BGP, Frame-relay, MPLS, Network Monitoring, WhatsUp Gold, SonicWALL Firewalls, Catalyst 45xx, Cisco IP Telephony, Cisco Call Manager 4.0, Cisco Unity voicemail

Requirements:
CCNA, College Degree (B.S. or B.A.), 3+ years Telecom experience, Cisco VoIP experience

This leads me to ask a question of network administrators/managers out there. Would a certification on WhatsUp Gold be relevant to building your career credentials?