Software is eating the world…. and eating your job?

A funny thing happened today. I was looking for a reference to Marc Andreessen’s original, “software is eating the world,” quote and came across an article on TechCrunch that expressed many of the same thoughts I was going to write about. However, it doesn’t specifically cover the service provider and OSS industries so I’ll push on, with a few borrowed quotes along the way (in italics, like the following).

Today, the idea that “every company needs to become a software company” is considered almost a cliché. No matter your industry, you’re expected to be reimagining your business to make sure you’re not the next local taxi company or hotel chain caught completely off guard by your equivalent of Uber or Airbnb. But while the inclination to not be “disrupted” by startups or competitors is useful, it’s also not exactly practical. It is decidedly non-trivial for a company in a non-tech traditional industry to start thinking and acting like a software company.”
[or the traditional tech industry like service providers???]

This is completely true of the dilemma facing service providers the world over. A software-centric network, whether SDN, NFV, or others, is nearly inevitable. While the important metrics don’t necessarily stack up yet for SDN, software will continue to swarm all over the service provider market. Meanwhile, the challenge is that the existing workforce at these companies, often in the hundreds of thousands of people, don’t have the skills or interest in developing the skills essential for the software defined service provider of the (near) future.

Even worse for those people, many of the existing roles will be superseded by the automations we’re building in software. Companies like AT&T have been investing in software as a future mode of operation for nearly a decade and are starting to reap the rewards now. Many of their counterparts have barely started the journey.

This old post provided the following diagram:
Network_Software_Business_Venn
The blue circle is pushing further into the realm of the green to provide a larger yellow intersection, whereby network engineers will no longer be able to just configure devices, but will need to augment their software development skills. For most service providers, there just isn’t enough IT resources around to make the shift (although with appropriate re-skilling programs and 1+ million IT/Engineering resources coming out of universities in India and China every year, that is perhaps a moot point).

Summarising, I have two points to note:

  1. Bet on the yellow intersect point – service providers will require the converged skill-sets of IT and networks (include security in this) in larger volumes… but consider whether the global availability of these resources has the potential to keep salaries low over the longer term* (maybe the red intersection point is the one for you to target?)
  2. OSS is software and networking (and business) – however, my next post will consider the cyclical nature of a service provider building their own software vs. buying off-the-shelf products to configure to their needs

Will software eat your job? Will software eat my job? To consider this question, I would ask whether AI [Artificial Intelligence] develops to the point that it does a better job at consultancy than I can (or any consultant for that matter)? The answer is a resounding and inevitable yes… for some aspects of consultancy it already can. Can a bot consider far more possible variants for a given consulting problem than a person can and give a more optimal answer? Yes. In response, the follow-up question is what skills will a consulter-bot find more difficult to usurp? Creativity? Relationships? Left-field innovation?

* This is a major generalisation here I know – there are sectors of the IT market where there will be major shortages (like a possible AI skills crunch in the next 2-5 years or even SDN in that timeframe), sometimes due to the newness of the technology preventing a talent pool from being developed yet, sometimes just for supply / demand misalignments.

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