EDITOR'S NOTE: I e-mailed Nicholas Carr about this post and he suggested that I pick up "The Big Switch" instead of relying on the Network World article, which he suggested might be a bit "sensationalistic." I'll swing by my local bookstore later tonight and see if they have it and will shortly go through it.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Nicholas Carr (who has kindly mentioned this blog in a post about Ad-block) has written a book called, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google. And according to Network World, Carr, who wrote an article called "Does IT Matter?" for Harvard Business Review, said in this book that:

"In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form," Carr writes. "It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud. Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical people."

Now, we haven't yet read Carr's book and so we can't comment on whether or not he makes a compelling case for the obsolescence of the IT department, and for all I know that quote was taken out of context. But I do believe that it will be a long time before the IT department goes away.

SAAS is a wonderful development, and apps like SalesForce are, to the people that use them, godsends. However, unique company problems require unique solutions - SAAS services are looking to appeal to the largest common denominator. For that reason alone, IT will always have a place in the enterprise.

Additionally, if you want to connect to the network, which you most certainly will have to do to access your SAAS applications, you need network engineers to build and maintain the network - even if it's just for Internet connectivity. And what about application performance?

Google or other SAAS providers will not design your WAN to deliver large backups during off-peak hours, won't get your VoIP service to work with your data applications without clogging the lines, and won't help maintain your company's computer security. (Heck, if nothing else, when a key Ethernet cable gets unplugged, you need at least a sysadmin to find out which cable was unplugged and to physically run down there and plug it back in.)

Relying solely on SAAS is problematic at best. You're at the mercy of another company's quality control - and if the site goes down, so does your business. Your company's data - important and confidential data - resides on another company's servers. Finally, what about capacity planning?

That last one is crucial. You are usually not privy to the capacity of third parties. Larger SAAS services like SalesForce probably scale well and overprovision. But if Carr's thesis - that eventually most enterprise software will be SAAS - holds true, there will be some applications that are further down the long tail and service a much more limited number of customers.

With a typical client/server app, you have all the information there if you need it - the ability of the server, the number of clients, the average traffic per client, and if you have any network management software, you have a very good idea of how much total traffic you can handle. But put that application out in the "cloud" and you no longer can see that information, so you have no idea whether or not you're doing fine or teetering on the edge of a major slowdown in the service. It completely negates any possibility of meaningful capacity planning.

Sure, it shifts the blame from the IT department to the SAAS provider, but ultimately, it's the same thing: less productivity, less on the bottom line.

If Carr's thesis is that SAAS is going to play more of a role in enterprise computing in the future, we can't help but agree. But to say that there's no role for IT in a future with more SAAS applications is assuming far too much.