Follow Tweet This Facebook LinkedIn

Main menu

Skip to secondary content
Menu
  • Tech News
    • Last 48 Hours
    • Analytics
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Careers
    • Cloud
    • Digital Transformation
    • Ecommerce
    • Education
    • Emerging Tech
    • Infrastructure
    • IT Workplace
    • Leadership
    • Managed Services & Outsourcing
    • Marketing
    • Mobility
    • Opinion
    • Privacy & Security
    • Public Sector
    • Software
    • Wireless & IoT
    • Women in Technology
    • Work from home
  • Resources
    • Reports and Whitepapers
    • News for CIOs
    • CIO Census
    • Digital Security Zone
    • Webinar Highlight Reports
    • Roundtable Highlight Reports
    • 2020 IT Salary Calculator
    • AI Directory
    • ITWC Talks
    • Featured Partner Content Hubs
    • Digital Magazines
    • Blogs
  • Events
    • Canada’s Top Women in Fintech/Blockchain
    • CANADA’S TOP WOMEN IN CYBERSECURITY
    • CIO OF THE YEAR
    • MapleSEC
    • UPCOMING EVENTS
    • FLAGSHIP EVENTS
    • VIrtual Events
    • Webinars
    • Roundtables
    • All IT World Canada Events
  • Videos
    • President to President
    • All Tech Videos
  • Podcasts
    • Cyber Security Today
    • #Hashtag Trending
    • Leadership in the Digital Enterprise
    • CMO Talks
    • ITWC Podcast Network
  • Engage
    • Blogger Opportunities
    • 2020 Vision
    • Gartner Corner
    • About Us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact Us
  • Subscribe
#TRENDING
  • Analytics
  • Women in Tech
  • MapleSEC
  • Work from home
  • Morning Briefing
  • Cloud
  • Technicity WEST

OUCH! Free Content gets hurt by enabled Ad Blockers

Please consider unblocking us or Subscribe in support of our great non-gated content.
The 11 most baffling vendor catchphrases
Infrastructure

The 11 most baffling vendor catchphrases

IT World Canada Staff
IT World Canada Staff
@itworldca
Published: August 9th, 2013
  • Adaptive Enterprise

    Adaptive Enterprise

    HP then-CEO Carly Fiorina announced the adaptive enterprise strategy with great fanfare following the first-year anniversary of the vendor’s merger with Compaq in 2003. What’s an adaptive enterprise? No one could really say, but it involved spending a considerable amount of money investing in HP products and services. Today it sounds like the way cloud computing firms would describe their customers, but as for HP, the firm quietly dropped the tagline following Fiorina’s ouster and the appointment of Mark Hurd a few years later.

  • Trustworthy Computing

    Trustworthy Computing

    Possibly the most ridiculed vendor catchphrase of all time, Microsoft launched its Trustworthy Computing initiative in January of 2002 with a memo from Bill Gates. The idea was to put more effort into making sure Windows and its other products were as secure as possible, but escalating issues around blended threats, botnets and viruses continue to dog the software giant to this day. The company’s antitrust trial that occurred around the same time did not help make “trustworthy computing” any more credible among enterprise IT departments.

  • Information Integrity

    Information Integrity

    Symantec came up with “information integrity” as a way to articulate the end goal of what using its products would accomplish in the enterprise, and started using the phrase around the time it acquired storage software giant Veritas in 2005. Although a number of media outlets picked up on the phrase, it never gained the kind of currency Symantec might have hoped perhaps because words like “protection” and “safe” are more powerful to most CIOs and IT managers.

  • On-Demand e-Business

    On-Demand e-Business

    Even Big Blue staffers must have gotten sick of suggesting to customers they become an “on-demand e-business,” as IBM started calling some of its product and service offerings in 2003. Remote management of Web servers and similar offerings did resonate with many firms, but perhaps not as quickly as the company would have liked. As cloud computing came to the fore, IT departments started hearing more about flexibility than on-demand, and “e-business” went the way of many failed dot-com startups.

  • Information Lifecycle Management

    Information Lifecycle Management

    StorageTek may have originally come up with it, but storage behemoth EMC Corp. began aggressively using the phrase “information lifecycle management” (ILM) around 2003 to discuss the way customers would collect, manage and retain data over a given period of time with products like its Celerra system. Other vendors, including SAP, later adopted the phrase, but most IT departments are still much more focused on information in its infancy, and deal with the data deluge long after the fact. Some are now talking about “integrated ILM” which bring in other technologies.

  • Enterprise Services Architecture

    Enterprise Services Architecture

    At a time in the mid-Aughts when nearly everyone in the IT industry was talking about creating a service-oriented architecture (SOA) of loosely-coupled components, SAP was talking about an “Enterprise Services Architecture,” which sounded like almost the exact same thing. Executives did a poor job of explaining why they needed to think about ESA vs. SOA, and even the Wikipedia entry for the phrase is labelled by the site’s editors as sounding too much like an advertisement.

  • Scalable enterprise computing

    Scalable enterprise computing

    This may be one of the few things Dell Inc. hasn’t worked very aggressively to sell. In what seems to be a way of conveying how far a company can grow using its mix of hardware, storage and services, the formerly direct-only success story began referring to a “scalable enterprise” approach to working with IT .

  • Pervasive computing

    Pervasive computing

    Another Microsoft catchphrase, used in this case to promote products such as its Windows 3.0 Add-on Pack for mobile devices around the year 2000. The problem here may be that the phrase is not associated with Microsoft alone. Pervasive computing, among computer science researchers, is also sometimes called “ubiquitous computing,” and has more to do with seeing IT available in a variety of environments and inputs rather than, well, market share. Microsoft is now talking about the “natural user interface” to describe this experience.

  • Performance-per-watt

    Performance-per-watt

    In 2005, as its race for Gigahertz supremacy with AMD started to get a little dull, Intel tried to shift attention away from merely looking at how fast its processors were working. At the keynote of its annual Developer Forum in San Francisco that year, Intel chief Paul Otellini said the emphasis would instead be on “performance-per-watt” as IT departments started focusing more on the environmental impact of their investments. Ultimately, however, nothing got Intel customers as excited about the chips as their speed.

  • Seamless computing

    Seamless computing

    Not to pick on Microsoft too much, but in 2003 Bill Gates used his traditional Comdex trade show keynote to unveil the era of “seamless computing” that would blend the IT experience between work and home life. This did eventually happen, but today we talk much more about the “consumerization” of IT. Perhaps because, despite everything, managing data between the office and the living room is still sometimes challenging. There may be a reason why they didn’t refer to it as “perfectly seamless computing.”

  • Data Center 3.0

    Data Center 3.0

    No, you didn’t make miss anything. There was never really a “Data Center 2.0” strategy at the world’s biggest networking company. Nonetheless, Cisco’s John Chambers in the last several years has been talking about Data Center 3.0 to describe the way its collection of switches, software and other products will potentially create more dynamic IT environments. Will it catch on with enterprise IT managers and their peers? If not, perhaps Data Center 4.0 may not be far behind.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11












Tweet This Facebook LinkedIn google+
Infrastructure HP, IBM
What I like about network management
What I like about network management
CIOs Worry About Losing Mainframe Talent
CIOs Worry About Losing Mainframe Talent

Related Content

Ransomware the top attack type in Canada last year: IBM report

IBM hands out $3M in cybersecurity funding for U.S. public schools

A brief history (so far) of quantum computing [PART 3]

2020’s who’s who in U.S. patents: IBM still No. 1

Tweets by itworldca

Follow
Tweet This Facebook LinkedIn google+

Subscribe
Resources CanadianCIO Digital Security CMO Digital CDN Magazine IT Salary Calculator LightningPR Webinars and Events Tech Research Partner Content
IT World Canada Community About Us Contact Us Technology Videos IT News IT Blogs Mobility News Cloud Computing Technology Topics ITWC Talks
ITWC Websites ITWC.ca Channel Daily News.com IT World Canada.com IT Business.ca Direction Informatique.com
© 2021 IT World Canada