It seems sometimes like being in technology means learning a new acronym every day. And to make matters worse, every marketing department is busy trying to think up the next “market-leading, self-defining, world-beating…” term to define their version of “the ultimate truth.”

Right now in the areas we work in we have terms like SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, Cloud, Agile, Scrum, Xtreme, and that is just the beginning. When I try to talk to clients about the “options” they have for their products today – it is in part an exercise in term definition to insure we are all on the same page. Just in the area of SaaS, there are literally hundreds of different approaches to what is considered to be a relatively new product configuration.

Recently, in scanning the web, I have seen a whole new crop of bloggers redefining terms we’ve been using for several years. It is becoming a self-defeating exercise. But, this morning I did come across an article about “cloud computing” in general that begins to make some sense and, at least for me, erase some of the difficulty. Admittedly, the author has his own drum to beat – he’s the VP of Products for Appistry, a cloud provider – but in his post, “The Blind Men and the Cloud,” he makes some good points. According to Sam, from a “user perspective” cloud computing should be defined as:

Cloud Computing is the evolution and convergence of many seemingly independent computing trends:

• Commoditization
• Internet Delivery
• Virtualization
• Grid Computing
• SOA
• Data Center Automation
• SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, XaaS
• Utility Computing
• Distributed Computing
• Web 2.0
• IT Outsourcing
• Storage

He goes on to use the blind man and the elephant as an analogy in a poem – which I strongly urge you to read in the context of his article. His points are valid – it is all part of one trend regardless of how it is described. To his list I would also add the ever-popular “On-Demand” which is another aspect of how offerings “in the cloud” are viewed.

So, once again, I’m going to rethink my definitions – is IT outsourcing just resources in the cloud? Is SaaS really a definitive term with so many different (and valid) approaches? What is XaaS by the way? (It is just a general term for “anything as a service” thought up to avoid the rapidly growing list of yada-yada as a service). …And does it really matter?

What really does matter is what makes up the service and on that point I think many marketing groups are missing their marks. For some reason, the reliability of the service (SLAs), security (audits and standards), data portability, and those underlying but critical service aspects of the application are tucked under the bed in marketing. Yes, the line-of-business folks can test the user interface and workflow and pronounce the application worthy, but what is keeping it afloat? These are features – no? It all comes back to the basics – forget the acronyms because they are telling us nothing of significance. Tell us what this thing does for us and how it enables us to do our work and be successful. End of story.