The number of IT professionals is set to grow by almost 50 per cent by 2020, according to the chief executive of EMC.
At the company's annual conference, attended by IT PRO, Joe Tucci claimed the decade would see acceleration in the IT job market, but warned it wouldn't keep pace with the industry's rapid data growth.
"If you are sat out there then you have picked the right industry as there is going to be a lot of opportunity," he said during his keynote speech.
"On the other side, you have got to create a lot of productivity."
Citing the latest EMC sponsored data prediction report from IDC, Tucci said there would be 35 zetabytes of data by the end of the decade, 90 per cent of which would be unstructured. In addition, server volumes are expected to grow 1,000 fold, with most being virtualised.
On top of that, there would be 300 quadrillion files in existence by the end of 2011, he claimed.
This "data deluge" would afford many opportunities for workers in the IT industry, Tucci said, but he admitted the 47 per cent rise would still make it "challenging" to deal with the increasing customers' needs.
Big scale investment
Tucci showed off how much his company was willing to invest in the new world of exponential data growth and the continuing "journey to the private cloud" the tagline from last year's conference.
He revealed EMC had invested, on average, $3 billion (1.84 billion) each year for the past eight, on organic research and development, along with acquisitions.
"Last year, we spent almost $5 billion on this journey," Tucci added.
'Defacto' hybrid
The CEO concluded his keynote with the bold claim all companies would this year get with his way of thinking. The hybrid model for cloud computing is the way forward, he claimed.
"This is the year when most if not all applications get virtualised all IT professionals will understand the opportunity of where cloud meets big data [and] the hybrid cloud will become the defacto choice [for enterprise]," Tucci said.
He called the migration of companies to private clouds, whilst also taking advantage of public providers, a "tremendous opportunity."
"The winning model is going to be [hybrid] to balance workloads across your own data centres and service provider data centres," Tucci said.
We are in Las Vegas at the EMC World 2011 conference so check our news roundup for all the news coming out of the annual storage gathering.
