Will consultants be moved into the cloud as well?

Question

I have a theory. There is a definate shift towards cloud computing, and the big players believe there is marketshare worth having in this space.

But how long before organisations start downsizing their internal development teams? Is it more cost effective to hire a consultant for a period of time for a project as opposed to keeping staff on a permanent basis? Would cloud consultants drive up the quality of development through competition? Where would these consultancies live? As they are now, or in some new manner? Does it make sense to bundle the development process and end product in the cloud?

I find the concept intriguing.

Answer 1

Interesting question. I don't think most companies will give up internal teams, for some corporations they just have to have someone available 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, whom they can access at any time. Sure, there are those where IT isn't that big part of the company, and they can afford outsourcing it all to the consultants. But for others, they have to have an internal team.

But I do think that the real money in the software industry comes from building successful products. You would do well to brainstorm some potential product ideas and begin working on one of them in your free time.

Answer 2

I think you'll run into the same barriers as lot of previous outsourcing efforts;

Most companies that are sufficiently non-standard to develop own software also find great value in having developers who understand the organization somewhat. If their needs were such an easily outsourced commodity, they probably should have purchased the service a long time ago. I think quality is promoted by people and process, not really by competition.

Answer 3

The most common employers of consultants are businesses that generally want assistance in the development of internal business systems (rather than say developing a new product for resale). Good consultants should be able to understand the business they are working for and assess the pros and cons of technical solutions and implementation in regard to the business needs and drivers. I'm not sure you can get that level of involvement and understanding by being in the cloud.

Answer 4

What does it mean exactly when you refer to consultants moving into the cloud?

If you look at things such as rent-a-coder, then it could easily be argued that, for some services that consultants offer, they have already been moved into the cloud.

As for the question of whether consultants are cloud-located or physically-located... this will not change much due to cloud computing.