Conferences are back. Learning is back in-person!
We’re taking the opportunity to reconnect with the thought leaders in our industry, with key partners, and with peers.
Last week a couple of us attended “IT Nation Connect” in Florida, and this week we also have someone attending “Edge” in Australia. It’s become apparent how important these opportunities are and how much we learn from them.
For example, we were hearing that the talent crisis, a.k.a. “Great Resignation” was a global problem, but the extent is a concern. There are 10M vacancies for IT engineers in the US, 4M in the UK and 2M in ANZ. The US commentators think it’s only going to get worse, but the Australian commentators think the worst is behind us and has started to ease in the last few weeks. It feels very real and current to me, but I was encouraged by the amount of work going on to help people choose IT as a career.
At least a third of those vacancies are cyber-related -the people who work hard to keep us safe. That means there is cyber-protection work that isn’t happening because there aren’t enough people to do it. That scares me, and the entire industry. The collective gasp when we heard that was extraordinary.
There’s a lot of consolidation in the IT industry with a significant increase in M&A. US and Australian firms like Kinetics are merging and being taken over (not us!) and key software vendors are coming together as well to find synergies. That seems particularly prevalent in cyber-software companies.
Finally, there has been a global shift in expectations of businesses on what they need their IT partner to do. It is early days, and not all IT partners will understand that their customers need IT help to realise their business needs. How does IT help them expand into new markets and services, mitigate business risks or streamline business processes? That’s exciting for us because it’s what our FlightPlan system is all about, and we were thrilled that many other IT partners across North America and Australia are picking up the software tool we’ve built to do that.
This is especially important because the expert researchers told us that despite the workforce shortages, the IT world is growing. 39 Billion end point devices will be added by 2025 and 4.4B internet users.
