This blog was contributed by Pam Miller, Research Director, IDC.

Business customers want in their business life the same techno logy advantages that they enjoy in their personal life. This includes paying for services as they use them.  If your electric bill was a flatfixed fee based on some arbitrary criteria created by your utility company you would most likely be unhappy, unless you had the biggest house with the most kids in your neighborhood. The same applies in the new cloud economy. Consumption pricing better matches utility to expense, and is rapidly becoming more important as SaaS services expand and use cases diversify.

After months of preparation and anticipation for NRF’s Big Show, I arrived at the Javits Center in New York City early Saturday morning ready for the event of the year to begin, and of course to make sure our booth setup was going smoothly. Weaving my way around crates, boxes, rolled up rugs and beeping forklifts was no easy task and it was hard to imagine the NRF Expo would start in just over 24 hours and the stacks of packing crates would be replaced by thousands of retailers from around the world.

In the technology industry, we rely heavily on acronyms in conversation to minimize the terms that we commonly use, so much to the point where Avnet literally has an internal dictionary of 500 plus acronyms for reference. Although these terms are used frequently and understood by those in the channel, including those that we use often in the cloud: ACT, AWS, Iaas, Saas, Paas, when I explain what I do to those who may not work in technology, I often get blank stares. I found the article below, written by IBM Software Client Architect Albert Barron, to be quite humorous as he puts a twist on explaining the cloud industry and the “as-a-Service” model by relating it to something that everyone loves and understands – Pizza. Read the article below, Pizza-as-a-Service, and let us know in the comments if there are any other ways you explain what you do in the channel to those who may not understand the business.

It’s typical for the data from consumer attraction venues—for example ticket sales, retail, and concessions—to sit in siloed systems that don’t easily communicate with each other, causing those business areas to operate independently when they are actually inextricably intertwined.