This week, in my hotel in New York, I flipped on the television to see an advertisement from Microsoft around “To the Cloud” and shortly after that commercial, up popped another commercial with someone clicking away on their iPad to access their documents in the cloud.  If that wasn’t enough, I fired up my laptop to read one of my favorite industry blogs, and who is on the side ad? – Salesforce.com.  Two minutes later, I clicked out to another blog, and Symantec.Cloud popped up.  It was enough to make me go crazy.

How many of us remember the early days of .NET?  When it first came to market, it wasn’t the development and platform play it is today.  It seemed as though everything that Microsoft published inherited the .NET suffix.  If the trend had continued, can you imagine our Xune.NET’s, our XBOX 360.NET?  For a brief term, a technical term that had a great foundation turned into a marketing initiative, forever bastardizing the term and turning what was a brilliant platform play into a consumer-disorienting marketing strategy which left us all trying to figure out what .NET meant.

Fast-forward to 2011… here we go again.  “TO THE CLOUD!”  “I’m in the cloud”  “We run our business in the cloud.”  “Secure with the cloud” “We run a hybrid cloud”  — Here we go again killing another great technical term with so many different definitions that will drive the word into obscurity.

For those of you that follow me, I’m going to do my part to not see the word fall into oblivion.  Starting now, I’m taking an oath… and oath to save the word.  How am I going to accomplish this task? – It’s really simple actually, I want to remove the obscurity and come back to the roots of the cloud and the core decisions an organization makes to enable their cloud.  Simply put, let’s break the cloud back into it’s micro components.  Let’s talk about people using virtual servers in the cloud about working with Infrastructure-as-a-Service and not bastardize the word.  It’s a really simple equation:

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS):  An application or line of business function that is performed using a cloud application like Salesforce.com, NetSuite, SuccessFactors, Google Apps or Microsoft Online Service.
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS):  This category gets a lot more vague, but is comprised of platforms in the cloud that enable applications to exist in a copacetic manner.  Great examples of this would include things such as the Force.com platform from Salesforce, or Google App Engine from Google to name a few.
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): This category comprises infrastructure existing in the cloud.  This category blends somewhat with PaaS depending on your environment, but if you can access a raw server in the cloud and remote in like an Amazon EC2 instance or GoGrid server, you are clearly in this category.  It’s still up to you to manage the infrastructure beyond the base management that the provider gives you.  Recently, certain other services like DNS on Demand are starting to infiltrate this category as it truly is infrastructure, but I’m a purist on this.

Let’s all fight back… let’s be specific.  Today, I talked to a reporter and he mentioned the word cloud isn’t something most business wants to hear… He’s right, it’s all about how the cloud is used… not about just using the cloud.  Join the cause… keep the cloud from falling into a marketing oblivion!

It’s ironic, as I write this blog, I’m on a flight back from New York to Minneapolis.  I guess I have to hit it one more time myself before I start safeguarding the word… I guess you could say, I’m in the cloud right now.

- Rob