VMware-related knowledge and skills are more in demand than ever, according to IT job board Dice.It's hard to read two sentences in a technology magazine these days without
bumping into the word "virtualization" or the company name VMware.
VMware has gained attention by simultaneously creating
new desktop standards, supporting
disaster recovery, looking
to the midmarket and increasing
revenues 69 percent.
Now IT job board Dice has announced that in the last six months, it's seen
postings for jobs requiring experience with VMware products surge 40 percent.
"The numbers have grown significantly," Tom Silver, senior vice
president of marketing and customer support at Dice, told eWEEK.
Silver attributed the growth in job postings in this area to
companies realizing that there are significant cost savings associated with
virtualization, coupled with the move to make data centers greener, as they
require less resources to run more quickly and cleanly.
Companies besides VMware, which once had the market largely to itself, have
also taken notice of the trend, with Citrix Systems, Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun
and Oracle also focusing heavily on virtualization technology.
Silver said he sees jobs in this are as an ideal career move for a
programmer or project manager.
"A programmer who is interested in learning more skills and helping to
improve efficiencies would be great for a job like this. Project management
continues to be one of the most in-demand skills, and coupled with programming
knowledge or virtualization experience, there is even more opportunity," Silver
said.
However, Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said he feels that virtualization is
such a buzzword these days, there's a lot of confusion as to what it actually
is.
"Everyone is calling everything virtualization these days. Though
actual virtualization has had a big spike in interest, too, and I have no doubt
that the demand for people who have worked with VMware [has] gone up by a lot,
it still may turn out to be a little over-hyped," Haff said.
Haff also argued that virtualization work is less on the developer side of
the house, and more operational in nature.
"The job is about knowing how to implement and optimize, with a strong
knowledge of Windows Server, SharePoint or Citrix Presentation Server. It's
much more about specific applications, ways of thinking and rolling out these
applications," Haff said.
Either way, it appears that many IT professionals are already undertaking
virtualization tasks. Forty percent of job seekers polled by Dice said they had
"virtualized a significant number of servers and services" in the last
year and another 10 percent reported plans to do so in the next 12 months.
"Primary programming skills, Java being the
biggest one—which are still the biggest part of our job listings—have remained
relatively flat in the same period that VMware listings have jumped," Silver
said.
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