November 02, 2009

Unisys official says cloud computing can save money by eliminating U.S. jobs

Official cites how the company was able to save money through implementing and remotely managing a private cloud

Cost savings generated by replacing U.S. workers with IT persons from India was cited as a benefit of private cloud computing Monday afternoon by a Unisys official at a technical conference.

Speaking at the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., Richard Marcello, president of technology, consulting, and integration solutions at Unisys, presented what he viewed as myths and truths about cloud computing, touching on both privately deployed clouds and public clouds. Covering the so-called myth that private clouds have no benefits over virtualization, Marcello said Unisys has deployed a private cloud internally and cut provisioning times from 10 days of manual provisioning time down to five minutes.

[ See more cloud computing and Unisys news from InfoWorld: "Cloud computing: Simply SaaS renamed?" | "Unisys unveils software for running private clouds" ]

"We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization," Marcello said.

Loss of IT jobs by U.S. workers has been a hot-button issue. Interviewed after his presentation, Marcello said cloud computing must be approached from a company perspective. "If people don't embrace cloud computing, I don't think the companies will be around in 5 to 10 years. I think you have to take that broader, holistic view," he said.

His point, Marcello said, was not so much about U.S. vs. India in the IT job space.  "It was more around the fact that it could be managed remotely" with fewer people, and thus saving money, Marcello said.

Marcello defined private clouds as a style of computing that delivers self-provisioned, automated IT capabilities as services to internal users on an as-needed and immediate basis.  Private clouds feature virtualization and more and can serve as an entry point into cloud computing, he said.

During his talk, he stressed the urgency of cloud computing. "Cloud computing is going to change everything, and you guys better get your act together," said Marcello.

He described cloud computing as "an evolutionary revolution."  It is revolutionary from a business perspective, while from a technology perspective it is about inheritance and convergence, taking the best of the Internet, distributed computing, and mainframes. Cloud computing also features technologies for virtualization, automation, and self-service, he said

Cloud computing will produce new business models and enable startups to compete with enterprise companies, he said.  Meanwhile, benefits are offered such as matching financial risk to monthly return in use of computers via pay-as-you-go cloud services, according to Marcello.

Cloud computing also is reliable and secure when architected, he said. It also can address regulatory issues, said Marcello.

This story, "Unisys official says cloud computing can save money by eliminating U.S. jobs," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.

Read more about cloud computing in InfoWorld's Cloud Computing Channel.

Paul Krill is an editor at large at InfoWorld.
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ggruber66 3-Nov-09 8:36am
This is either a stupid statement by the guy from Unisys, a mis-characterization of what he said by InfoWorld or both. Cloud Computing in and of itself does not increase or decrease the ability to offshore jobs. Remote Infrastructure Management has been going on for a long time before people were talking about clouds. Cloud does enable better utilization of computing resources and should improve the efficiency (e.g. requires fewer people) of managing and monitoring infrastructure, but has nothing to do with the location of where those support resources would be.
strukhoff 9-Nov-09 10:01pm
Paul reported it correctly, so your first assumption was correct--it was a dumbass thing for Marcello to say. I reported on this speech, too, but was streaming it in from Asia, and missed the India comment when the stream was interrupted. Anyway, I didn't believe it. Marcello also said his kid gave a presentation that singlehandedly convinced Unisys--a $5 billion public company that's almost older than steam--to embrace cloud computing. Just a little creative storytelling, that's all. How many times have we heard recently about "the couple of guys in India" replacing entire buildings of people in the US? Many people tell a version of this story, but I never doubt that it's BS. I think people like to tell it because it makes them sound worldly and "with-it." But ask anyone who's outsourced. Even in the most extreme cases, no one has ever successfully replaced significant numbers of American jobs with "a couple of guys from India."

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