Microsoft: Cloud will create 14 million new jobs by 2015
by Steve Ragan - Mar 5 2012, 19:26
Cloud will create 14 million new jobs by 2015.(IMG:J.Anderson)
On Monday, Microsoft released the results of an IDC study they commissioned, which predicts 14 million new jobs across the globe by 2015, with more than a million of them here stateside. Further, the study reported that more than 60-percent of the spending for public IT cloud services came from the U.S.
The transition from the client-server model of old has been taken hold over the last decade. Much of what you know today as cloud computing started as SaaS, which was at the time promoted as the business initiative that would change the face of technology as you knew it. With change comes growth, and that growth comes with new jobs and revenue for businesses on each level.
By 2015, the IDC study says, business revenues from IT innovation enabled by the cloud could reach $1.1 trillion a year. This equates to a workforce boom of nearly 14 million new jobs by 2015 globally. China and India will account for nearly half of those new jobs, a third of which will occur in the communications and media (2.4 million), banking (1.4 million), and discrete manufacturing (1.3 million) industries.
Digging deeper, the study found that the number of newly created jobs will be somewhat proportional to the size of each industry, but not entirely. For example, in some industries, such as professional services and retail, the high percentage of small- and medium-size businesses will drive up adoption. Yet, in sectors such as banking, security issues will slow the move to the public cloud, but may increase adoption of private IT cloud services.
Although small businesses make up the majority of employment in most parts of the world, they are generally less computerized. At the same time, IDC expects small- and medium-size businesses to adopt cloud services faster than large companies, many of which are constrained by existing legacy investments, the study explained.
“Enterprises that embrace cloud computing reduce the amount of IT time and budget devoted to legacy systems and routine upgrades, which then increases the time and budget they have for more innovative projects. When IT innovation happens, business innovation is reached, which then supports job creation,” says John Gantz, senior vice president at IDC.
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