Overuse Clouds Buzz Term’s Meaning
This story demonstrates how quickly industry terms lose meaning due to the vendor-driven IT model. When a design philosophy such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be co-opted by vendors selling middleware, or when web hosting providers can simply start calling themselves Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers because they feel like it, brilliant concepts can be lost overnight in the sea of IT marketing buzzwords.
For this reason, it’s important to continue to speak to the market in terms of value and business outcomes, because those remain self-evident regardless of what term-du-jour IT marketers try to drown them in.
The part about Marc Benioff slapping a couple of “Cloud Computing” slides into a PowerPoint deck after reading the term in Businessweek is pretty funny, if for no other reason than we’re just as guilty of piggybacking on certain keywords to ride a wave of search engine traffic (i.e. Webware, a term that never meant anything to us, nonetheless generated a few medium-quality AdWords clicks when we stuck it in a campaign).
Very true. It’s difficult when you’re on the other end of the table as someone ACTUALLY delivering the thing that everyone else is trying be associated with by using the buzzwords every chance they get. However, the old “a rising tide lifts all ships” can come into play there. If you are the one still speaking in terms of value and outcome, and delivering results, you are in the perfect position to capitalize on everyone elses fluff.
This is a great point, and we’d be lying if we said we didn’t also coattail on messaging that we may not necessarily believe in, but will nonetheless drive prospects to our own messaging. “Cloud computing” is now a target keyword in our SEO strategy, with the thought being that if a potential customer comes to our site with at least some awareness of the concept, that’s less we have to educate during the sales cycle…and as we’ve found over the past several years, having to educate during the sales cycle translates into low single-digit conversion rates for even qualified opportunities.
Mike Topalovich