>I host a lot on AWS but you will need as many people in IT support as before
This doesn't pass the smell test at all. Datacenter ops are way more complex than AWS ops; why would someone on cloud need IT support for VMWare, BMC Ops, Power management and generation, supply chain management and land leasing/renting? These are the few roles, off the top of my head, that just go away when moving to the cloud at FedEx's scale.
This is because most people insist on not acknowledging that running your own datacenter will involve "mundane" tasks as "sourcing bolts on a Sunday before Thanks Giving". For a great deal of the people I spoke to, "running your own datacenter" means "we hired 3 servers from a thing in London and we had 1 guy installing linux on them".
Well, I didn't really meant data centers, just in general on premise infrastructure. There is a difference of course. Our administration is almost completely in the cloud, but for production and some adapted applications we still need local data. There is simply no technical solution to run everything in the cloud and we also want to retain some data locally. VMWare is an example. UPS and backups are another. Sure, we use service providers for provisioning of new VMs but IT still needs to do maintenance of the software that runs on it, needs to keep inventory about the servers running in the company. And if you have one VM running additional provisioning is not too much work.
But sure, at the scale of FedEx this is true, they also probably have a very high percentage of administration only. Although I still think the cooperation with MS was still a strategically planned after paying attention to Amazon.
This doesn't pass the smell test at all. Datacenter ops are way more complex than AWS ops; why would someone on cloud need IT support for VMWare, BMC Ops, Power management and generation, supply chain management and land leasing/renting? These are the few roles, off the top of my head, that just go away when moving to the cloud at FedEx's scale.