Fud Buster Friday #36 - Who needs IT when the Cloud is your choice, er master?

Ever take a vacation and come back to an alternate reality?
Well the last 8-10 days were bogged down in Passover holiday for me and I can say it is a new world.
One of my clients emailed to say the firm has committed to migrate to Domino 100%(they were 1/2 and 1/2).
Another client phoned and emailed that their server went down or rather as we found, the router failed.
Other clients emailed to say they had problems emailing specific people or domains and could we help them.

Also we will be a vendor for the Super Bowl, no, not as a Lotus item, but more on this as it materializes(if I am allowed to discuss it).

The nice thing is although I had a few hundred emails and a dozen or so voice mails, nothing horrible occurred. So the next question is who needs me or the IT staff?

Obviously we are still needed, on some basic level 1 support, all the way up to a migration of mail servers. But what would this look like if I pushed my clients to the Cloud I was wondering this week.

We would still need to provide relatively normal help desk functionality, so tier 1 but beyond that it would probably be out of our control and in the hands of our Hosts(IBM, Google or Microsoft).

So we then act as a middle man for the people with problems? Sounds like the IBM Support model we use where we sit on the phone instead of the customer to resolve higher level issues.

Services? Not so many anymore, applications is where it is at and this is my wonder.

If my clients can "download" an app and off they go, where do we fit in for this model of business? Yes we could design a new app, but really I'd rather do an iPhone app and make my millions that way, less headaches!

So where does your CIO, and I act as one for 3 different organizations currently, stand in the middle of all of this? What do you tell your IT staff? What is our or your value you bring to the business that would either negate The Cloud or enhance it and provide more value to you or your client?

When email is down, and thus your Blackberry, who are you goiong to call? Will it matter? Who uses email anyway? Or wires anymore? Or who pays for applications anymore that cost more than a dollar?

It's not as bleak as this may sound, nor is it as simple either. Think about it this weekend.