Can Cloud vendors move beyond the terminology debate?

I recently mentioned Richard Messik’s great post castigating Cloud vendors on their jargon overload in the panel discussions at Softworld back in October.  Over on AccountingWEB there has been some vigorous debate around the Cloud issues in discussion threads on whether accountants should be talking to their clients about Cloud Computing, the business case for SaaS, or the terminology itself.  If you meander through the discussions I draw three conclusions:

Dennis suggested this is a self inflicted wound and highlighted how some vendors are avoiding the Cloud term.  Back on those AccountingWEB discussions, Gary Turner of Xero commented:

AccountingWEB have a big potential problem here if they are losing “1%ers” like Gary from the debate, but it goes wider.  Even at the recent, highly successful launch of EuroCloud UK,
attended by around 60 vendors from SAP, NetSuite and Salesforce to the
smaller SaaS players, there was some argument over the Cloud and SaaS
terms.  I know that Phil Wainewright, EuroCloud UK’s chair, has recently helped avoid the whole of EuroCloud
get sucked in to a terminology debate where he feels there will too
many opinions across such a diverse group of vendors.  As he explained
to me:

I am one of the crowd that think it should be straightforward to get a consensus on terms like Cloud Computing, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and whether the Cloud is Public or Private. 
However, I can also see the waste of time this debate could be.  I’m
hoping we can all get beyond this, but places like AccountingWEB have a
role to play to provide resources to help demystify the topic, and
thought leadership for their readership so they can see why it is worth
investigating.

With all this going on, it is no coincidence that in the last 9 months the Intellect SaaS Group, the BASDA’s Cloud SIG and  EuroCloud UK,
already mentioned above, have all been formed.  SaaS is on the verge of
becoming mainstream in the UK, and all three groups are trying to
address this clear market demand for providing better information and
clarity.   All three are trying to hit exactly the problem we are
talking about here, but one of the ways we can move the debate on is
with practical initiatives as well as case studies and education
resources.  So a few weeks ago Dennis Howlett
triggered an idea which resulted in a preliminary meeting between 
Philip Wainewright, on behalf of EuroCloud UK, myself as  the acting
chair of Intellect SaaS Group, and BASDA’s CEO Jairo Rojas, hosted at
Chartered Accountants Hall by Richard Anning , head of the ICAEW’s IT Faculty. 
The aim is for the 3 vendor groups to work together with the Institute
representing their membership on the buy side of the equation to
address topics like security (on various levels from data to single
sign on  to APIs) to see if we can agree best practice or some form of
quality mark that all of the vendors could sign up to.  What we don’t
want is some complicated set of standards of the kind that OASIS and the OMG and other groups
are talking about – whatever we agree has to be practical, and add
value for the buyer (not the vendor or developer) and to make sure the
scheme is affordable for small SaaS startups as well as the bigger
players.  Dennis has already blogged about that first meeting at his place, and on the front page of ZDNet,
so the idea is getting a fair bit of attention.  All we’ve done so far
is open a sensible dialogue and laid down some good intentions, but all
the potential buyers, consultants and vendors I’ve spoken to so far are
very supportive.  A by-product of the meeting is that as well as
working on this “standards” issue we will make sure each group
cooperates where possible and uses their resources on complimentary
things.  Expect some specific announcements early in the new year.

(Cross-posted @ Business Two Zero)