I have seen this coming for a few years now as technology has transformed into a commodity service.

In short - evolution is at hand here, not revolution, so get your ITIL Masters and be the new breed of MCSE.

Take out your emotive responses and look at it like the PM says. We sell satisfaction. If the customer is not satisfied, then we'll soon be out of business. You can blame the Indian IT juggernaut, you can blame cloud services...the point is stop blaming and act. Act now before you are made irrelevant.

Take some business analyst classes, ride-along with the business, and understand what it means to be on the front line. We need that product to do what we asked for, when we asked for it, and for the price we were quoted. Who cares if you can "geek-ify" it. Results, not "cool" attributes or features are what drive the satisfaction.

I have been on both sides of the table as an IT Implementor, Systems Engineer, PM, and now Service Level Manager. I have to agree with the Project Manager.