The tech world loves a buzzword, but they aren’t always helpful. Adding confusion to an already complex subject can lead to businesses facing the insurmountable task of understanding what everything means.

 

1. Big Data

As someone that covers big data as one of my beats, I am frequently met with people throughout the tech industry that dislike this term.

Yes, data drives everything we do and this subject does matter, but labelling it as ‘Big’ suggests that there is a quantifiable range of data that it should be attributed to.

So what is that amount? Is one terabyte ‘big data’? The problem is that by adding big, it implies exclusivity to the problem.

Everyone has a data problem that needs to be addressed, so let’s just call it data.

 

2. IoT/IoE

Possibly the number one bandwagon to be jumping on – it’s the future, it’s going to be worth trillions to the world economy…everything is going to be connected to the internet and all that data is going to be analysed and everything will become personalised and amazing – in theory.

The Internet of Things or Internet of Everything is an evolution of the Machine to Machine market, just expanded from industrial machines to everything.

We also have the Intranet of Things, the Industrial Internet and the Internet of Your Things, it’s tiring.

 

3. Hybrid

This is more about being precise in what exactly you are talking about, is it hybrid IT or hybrid cloud? And it simply means two things.

Many companies have been operating hybrid IT for a long time, so it’s nothing particularly new, although dealing with rising levels of complexity may be.

Simply referring to things as hybrid is just a little lazy and like other buzzwords, increases complexity.

 

4. Agile

Is your business agile? Is your IT agile? I’m sure you may have been asked this question numerous times and it comes as standard when anyone talks about cloud as it enables agility.

What it simply means is that your business is flexible enough to be able to deal with changes in demand, new competition or changes in requirements. It allows you to respond and to grow.

 

5. Mobile first

The idea is that you think about your mobile first, for the app economy you need to be thinking mobile all the time because it’s a huge market.

There is nothing wrong with that, but it is too narrow minded a view. Simply thinking about development for mobile above everything else, places too much emphasis on it and not on other areas.

There are other areas such as applications or APIs which are important because of how much variability there is within devices, the move to wearables for example shouldn’t be ignored.

It almost implies that you should forget about whether it’s a good move, or if you have a market opportunity there.

 

6. Cloudify

This isn’t referring to the cloud orchestration software platform, it is simply the use of the word cloudify, as in to cloudify your business.

It’s an ugly word that is a short way of referring to making your applications or infrastructure suitable for the cloud, or putting them in the cloud.

But if you ask someone if they are cloudified you are more like to have to then explain to them what it means, defeating the purpose of the word and making it pointless, let’s cut it out.

 

7. Real-time data

It’s not good enough that you have access to your data and can analyse it, you need to be able to do it in real-time. Or at least in some cases it has a significant benefit, giving you insight immediately rather than having to wait around.

This isn’t a bad thing and it should be something that is strived for, however, where do you draw the line of what is real-time data and what isn’t?

If you are given the answer in 20 minutes, is that real-time? Or does it have to be instant?

This is something that needs to be cleared up, but expect to see a lot more real-time data in 2016.

 

8. Gamification

The idea is that you add a little fun and competitiveness into improving services or to engage users. So people will be encouraged to excel inside the system.

It may be a successful business strategy that leads to improvement and is something that more businesses seem to be adopting, or people could just do their jobs that they are paid to do?

Does everything have to be ‘fun’ for anything to get done?

 

9. Cloud

As the second major part of what I cover, I feel that I may just be criticising my own beats, but really, cloud is made up of many things, it’s a complex area that doesn’t need to just be reduced down to one word.

The generic term for commoditised services is made up of many layers, don’t forget that there are computers and software that run cloud and cloud services, it isn’t some mysterious thing floating through the sky.

It’s a buzzword that helps to keep the non-techie person from know what it is, which I’m sure will only hurt the industry.

 

10. Hyperconverged/Hyperconvergence

So your systems are integrated? Or converged? Oh hyperconverged, an even higher level of integration.

This means a system that combines, storage, networking and compute but that only takes up a small footprint. It simply means that the system is integrated with everything you need, I suppose you could call it multi-converged system, but hyper sounds more exciting.

Special mention to Uberisation or simply Uber and Airbnb used as examples in keynote speeches as disruptive companies. Please think of some new examples.