You know a technology has "made it" when people start making money off of it.
In the past few weeks, I've heard from a dozen or more organizations that are starting internal projects to automate specific tasks using PowerShell. Try as they might, these organizations haven't been able to get their team up to speed quickly enough. In most cases, it's because they've got their IT folks so overworked already that there's just no bandwidth; in a couple of cases their team has been... well, let's call it "reluctant."
(As an aside, I can't think of anything more dangerous to one's career than being "reluctant" to learn a new tech that the organization has decided to use.)
As a result, there's a cottage industry springing up to meet the need. Now, in most cases a decent .NET developer can be pretty effective with PowerShell, especially if they take the time to learn how to use it properly rather than treating it as a ".NET scripting language." There are also firms like Start-Automating, which sails in and helps jump-start your automation projects. Today I got word of PowerShellJobs.com, which is a sort of post-the-project-and-collect-bids site for organizations to connect with contractors. While these are both small efforts thus far, their mere existence is pretty telling. I mean, I don't recall a site specifically for bidding on VBScript work!
As PowerShell continues to permeate more and more of the Microsoft - and non-Microsoft - IT landscape, I imagine we'll see more and more independent contractors offering it as part of their services. And there's certainly no shame in an organization using them over internal resources; as I pointed out, so many internal teams are already overwhelmed. Having a contractor automate something in PowerShell offers you the ability to support that going forward, since PowerShell is still pretty straightforward to learn.
What's your take? Aside from a reluctance to spend money on outside help (which is pretty common these days), could you picture your organization making use of external talent to jump-start an automation project?
