And they are (almost) right..

This article is definitely correct! Today there generally is no one person responsible of performance, capacity, security AND it makes those jobs much more difficult, slower, open for useless attempts to fix or to be prepared to any problems, allows different, often mutually exclusive, solutions inside a corporations and so on!

The problem, even in this article still, is the IT focus! Instead of focusing to performance, capacity, security etc IT has now a while focused to products. No one looking the infrastructure as whole and it is inevitable to cause several problems!

The current attitude doesn't cause just corporate internal problems, it also makes creating, marketing and delivering systems with reliable performance, capacity and security much, much more difficult than it should be - as I'm sure F5, etc have found out.

I don't know when and/or where the current trend really started but in 70's and 80's it was a big issue to have a person educated in for example performance to lead the effort, inside corporation and in vendors. In 90's these requirements just started to disappear and are now almost nonexistent?

Yes - the comments in article are correct, it is a broad issue but maybe looking wrong solution - systems are easy, they have fixed capabilities and behavior, infrastructure definitely is not - too many parts, owners, external parameters, changing technology, not coordinated decisions, even pride and politics (not just technology!) playing havoc in the whole picture.

Personally, after 30+ years in large, even global systems performance and capacity planning, design and enhancing, I find it time to time a little frustrating! Working in a corporate, when something goes wrong with performance, a huge amount time and resources are wasted to find who, what, when, where and why made the problems to happen in first place. Too often some of the information is not any more available, gone with people, consultants or vendors who once were there but not available any more. This wasn't allowed at one time but seems a common practice today? Working for a vendor, there is no more a position in sales / delivery for a performance specialist, only product specialists? I have seen this causing huge problems, even billion $ deals failing after years, but love&hate trying to recover those projects - unfortunately it's not always possible! For example many of todays RFPs and RFP replies would have gone to wastebasket earlier!

I would say it is still a long way back to performance architects - as long as for example F5 wants to call them application delivery architects, because performance is not application, hardware or technology, it is a discipline. It is something with skills to model an infrastructure and components including for example human resources (often a big part of the problem) to knowing how to find and / or to predict problems. And after all that to work as a central point for specialists to make the performance, to enhance the performance and/or to fix the performance and continue to monitor and to predict next day.

Click to read the article this is in response to.