I just had my first sighting of what I think will be one of those buzz phrases that will get liberally lobbed into PR and marketing material in the weeks and months to come. It was used this morning in the loopy assertion that a central download portal for public service videos was “essentially delivering ‘cloud computing’ for PSAs.”

Well, no.

Cloud computing is mostly known as managed server farms set up under a business and operating model that allows IT people to  increase capacity or add new capabilities pretty much on the fly, without buying iron (servers) or new software, and without adding bodies. The many companies in the DS space who do Software as a Service kinda, sorta do cloud computing, but only kinda, sorta. The SaaS comapnies tend to more be the customers of heavy-duty IT hosting companies that do the work, like Rackspace and ThinkGrid.

The propeller-heads can argue what the real pure definition of cloud computing is, but it is definitely not about simple tasks such as putting up some files in a central spot so people can download them.

Some gentle advice: don’t just throw buzz phrases in to your pitch because they are popular. They should also be appropriate, and your company will come off better if it appears you might actually know what you are going on about.

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