Virtualization is not only making the silos fall in-between IT operations groups within the enterprise but also the silos in skill sets of the individual engineer. I wrote this piece over on TechTarget discussing how full convergence of networking, storage and compute will completely change what the enterprise looks for in a systems engineer. With VMworld 2013 coming up there’s plenty of hype around NSX VMware’s fully integrated version of Nicira’s Network Hypervisor. If it delivers on the hype the role of the engineer will change forever.
Similar to the change that Cloud Computing brings to the engineer role there will be a change to the different operational roles within the enterprise data center. It’s becoming more critical for engineers to diversify their skill sets. I personally believe a crunch will be coming in the number of available roles for dedicated SME’s in a single data center ares such as Storage, Networking or Servers. There may never be a time when VMware’s Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) is implemented in the purest of forms but, there will be a undeniable impact on the role of the systems engineer as these services converge.
What are your thoughts? Am I jumping the gun in my prediction or do you see a tightening of the market around virtualization skill?
Virtualized Geek 
I think it isn’t just virtualization and especially cloud environments (virtualization alone isn’t enough, it’s the cloud layer on top that is pushing to control the whole stack), but it’s also devops that is changing who does what or how tasks are handled.
Great point Lennie. I’m actually writing a piece for another blog about the impact of the Cloud layer on IT governance.