According to IDC, by 2014 one third of all IT organizations will provide cloud services through business partners rather than provide IT internally. By 2015, spending on public cloud services (including SaaS) will make up 46 percent of all new IT spending. Of that, SaaS will make up 75 percent. So as these shifts occur, who in IT is positioned to win, and who is doomed to lose? InfoWorld breaks it down by job title. Winner: Enterprise Architects A job often considered too abstruse for many companies and too narrowly focused to be practical for others will rise to prominence. Winner: System Administrators Architects may design and tune cloud infrastructures, but system administrators do the detailed work of spreading workloads across servers, virtual servers and data centers, assigning CPU cycles, memory, storage and other resources as needed to keep performance high. Winner: Front-Line IT Managers Lower-level IT supervisors and managers will have to make major changes to their responsibilities and daily routines under cloud infrastructures — and for the same reasons that apply to sys admins. Changed Role: CIO and Senior IT Managers Senior-level IT managers are having their responsibilities expanded and barriers among them broken down — or should have — to accommodate more flexible infrastructures that include applications or islands of computing power housed with external service providers. Changed Role: Enterprise Developers It's not that large companies will be using less software than they used to, it's just that they won't be writing or customizing nearly as much of it themselves. Loser: IT Middle Managers If there is one class within IT that will suffer from wider adoption of cloud and virtualized systems, it is those between the hands-on supervisors and the managers who work directly with the CIO. Losers: Technical Specialists Specialized skills have long been a guarantor of success. Not anymore. IT people working with applications based in the cloud need to know about networking, storage, security, user interfaces and all the other parts of the infrastructure that application touches. Source: InfoWorld