The rise of cloud computing will cut jobs across the lower ranks of the IT industry, as the ‘dull’ tasks of maintaining existing infrastructure become automated or simply unnecessary, an executive from computing giant Hewlett-Packard has warned.

Vice president and managing director of HP in the UK and Ireland, Stephen Gill, said the trend towards the “everything-as-a-service” model of cloud computing would see companies outsourcing, virtualising and hosting their IT needs, relying less on their own internal infrastructure.

"Most IT departments want to be flexible and responsive to the needs of the business and that is hard to do if you are spending 70 per cent of your budget on infrastructure," he said, adding that the trend will change the flavour of corporate IT.

“Overall you will see less people but with different and more exciting roles.”

He predicted that junior roles would be the first to go. “The junior roles are the ones that are usually dull and that will be automated anyway,” he said.

Gill added that the current climate of economic uncertainty was a “fantastic opportunity” for organisations to reorganise their IT departments and drive down costs.

HP has cut its own IT staff from 19,000 to 10,000 over the past three and a half years.

The company expects that the shift towards corporate cloud computing will include the proliferation of online services offering backup, storage and applications, reducing the need for local processing power and software packages.

HP’s prediction comes as Google announces its "App Engine" service offerings, which will allow web developers to build on top of the search giant’s existing infrastructure.

Google’s launch offering includes 500MB of free storage and enough CPU and network bandwidth to support five million page views per month, a direct challenge to incumbent Amazon Web Services which provides a range of paid-for online storage, database and cloud computing services.

Further reading

HP refocuses R&D on cloud computing

The Big Switch Nicholas Carr, famed for his earlier judgement that ‘IT doesn’t matter’, maps out the transformation of IT into utility services.