The Cloud will be major job creator (for India and China) says study
In the United States, unemployment and the scarcity of new jobs is continually a hot-button issue, especially now in the Presidential primary season. But job creation is a topic of special importance all over the world and residents of countries like Nigeria, South Africa, Canada, Ireland, and Singapore are all doing far more searches on "job creation" than U.S. residents.
So is a global shift to the cloud a good thing for job creation? Market intelligence company IDC on Monday released the results of a four-year, Microsoft-commisssioned study (.pdf here,) that says it is. The study predicts the number of jobs that will be created by a widespread shift to cloud computing, and where those jobs will be created.
"Cloud Computing" is, of course, a very broad term, referring to anything from the use of third-party storage facilities, to IT for virtualized infrastructure, and the whole affair, the study ascertained, will create nearly 14 million new jobs worldwide by 2015, and could drive $1.1 trillion in revenue per year.
IDC calculated the number of "cloud-generated" jobs by weighing several factors, including available country workforce, unemployment rates, GDP, IT spending by industry and company size, industry mix by country and city, technology infrastructure by country and city, regulatory environment, and others.
And even the United States has thus far accounted for 62% of the worldwide spending on public IT cloud services, the majority of the jobs created by cloud adoption are expected to go to India and China. Those two countries will experience job growth that exceeds North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the rest of the Asia-Pacific region combined.
“We tend to think of China and India as emerging markets, but they’re actually early adopters of the cloud,” John Gantz, senior vice president at IDC and author of the white paper said on Monday. “They’re not bound to existing systems. They’ve skipped that step, so there’s less holding them back.”
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