It’s not that the concept of “infrastructure-as-a-service” is flawed… it’s the acronym that is doomed. Let’s face it, “SaaS and “PaaS” can be said out loud, but when you say “IaaS” in same way, well, it just doesn’t work. I’m reminded about something my mother once told me about what happens when I assume.
It’s a shame too, as the taxonomy for the services side of cloud computing has clearly emerged in 2009 with virtually all analysts agreeing on the holy trinity of IaaS, Paas, and SaaS. I have to hand it to Verizon for naming their cloud service CaaS, for “computing-as-a-service.” This acronym makes as much sense or more and is so much easier to say out loud. Perhaps their marketing folks had the same realization as I’m having about “IaaS” and were maybe even hopeful that “CaaS” would catch on.
So what should we do as an industry? I see three options:
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Migrate from IaaS to CaaS and make Verizon’s day
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Consolidate IaaS and PaaS into just PaaS, as the distinction between these two is getting blurrier as offerings from Amazon and Microsoft’s Azure evolve.
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Replace IaaS with another term that’s not a “C”… but what? I spent some time looking at synonyms for the word “infrastructure” but just didn’t see anything that worked really well. Anyone have any ideas?
About Joshua Beil
Joshua Beil (@joshbeil) is the Director of Market Strategy and Research for Parallels, the leading provider of automation and virtualization software to the web hosting community. Previously, Josh was the Director of Social Media & Technology at a Level 3 Communications [Nasdaq: LVLT] where he provided strategic and tactical sales support. Before that, Josh was CEO and cofounder of Skywave Broadband, Inc, the largest commercial WiFi service provider in Hawaii. He was named one of Pacific Business News' Forty Under 40 for 2006, and in 2005, he was named a High Tech Leader by the Pacific Technology Foundation. Before co-founding Skywave, Mr. Beil was VP of Research and Development for the market research boutique, Tier 1 Research, where he covered the Internet infrastructure sector as an analyst, and negotiated and sold subscriptions to Tier 1's research services. Josh has also previously served as the Senior Analyst for Exodus Communications as well as the internationally known market research firm, IDC. He holds a Certificate in E-Business from UCSC Extension, and he graduated with honors from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a major in Psychology.
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