A recent informal survey of tech jobs available in Hawaii revealed one of the larger employers in town hiring for the following positions:

Manager, IT Business Analysis
Enterprise Systems Architect
Senior Applications Engineer - mySQL
Senior Applications Engineer - Informatica
Senior Applications Engineer - .Net

The names have been changed to protect the innocent, but you get the idea.These are five positions that are probably pretty-well paid, with medical, dental, vision, 401(k), etc. And this is just what they’re hiring this month. Quite a large expense.

The management teams of companies like this one probably think they’re doing the smart and responsible thing by seeking to hire the best and brightest to run their IT infrastructure.

How much money could they save by letting professional data center managers run their hardware? How much better and brighter are the personnel running infrastructure for the world’s leading data centers? And how much safer, more secure and reliable would their critical business data be there? How much better would their software run if it was maintained and managed by a team of over 1,000 specialists who run a world-class system for over a million users? How much more effective would the company be if they were focused on their core business, understanding their customers and the information about them, instead of spending their resources on managing their software and IT infrastructure?

Hard to quantify. Wouldn’t it be nice to find out?