“I’ll just use the Internet. It’s brilliant.” That’s what a good friend of mine said in the winter of 2000 when he was explaining how he was going to revolutionize the business of accounting. It was his brainchild – to provide restaurants with a service that would allow operators to transmit their financials securely over the Internet. “My business will offer interactive online services including payroll, accounts receivable and a virtual filing cabinet – using a Web-based platform that would eliminate the need for multiple accounting and tracking systems.” Hmmmm…Does any of this sound vaguely familiar?
Honestly, at the time, I was intrigued. This seemed like a radical idea. While I was having a little trouble grasping the concept – remember, it was over a decade ago – I could sense that it was the way of the future. “Count me in,” I said. And with that, I was on board – given the job of creating the corporate brand, messaging, and marketing. (Really, I had no choice. We were good friends, he was broke, and I was the only marketing consultant he knew who would actually work for restaurant gift cards.)
Today, as I look back on the iterations of Web copy, messaging, advertising, training materials, and press releases, I realize that the language of technology has changed but the actual technology has remained relatively the same.
I first wrote about the accounting solution as a Web-based service – transmitting data via point of sale over the Internet to the company’s accountants for analysis. When managed services became the industry buzz word for this type of service, I began writing with this terminology.
It happened again, only a few years ago, when the industry was using the term software-as-a-service (SaaS). The core process being used to support the company’s 600 restaurant clients with their financials had not changed, but the way we were pitching it continued to morph. We modified our messaging with every new term that was adopted by the industry to essentially describe computing in which services and storage are provided over the Internet.
I guess you know where I’m going with this by now. “Computing in which services and storage are provided over the Internet.” Sounds a lot like the new definition of cloud computing doesn’t it? Of course, things have evolved since the first restaurant signed up in 2001 – with the introduction and adoption of technologies and concepts like elastic computing, virtualization and multi-tenancy. Semantics aside, I’m pretty sure this Internet-Managed Service-Cloud Computing-thing is more than just a fad with a somewhat ambiguous name.
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