Interesting post over at thewhir.com by Joshua Beil, the Director of Market Strategy and Research for Parallels. In his post Beil asks a simple yet profound question. Is the term "IaaS" doomed?

He says "It’s not that the concept of “infrastructure-as-a-service” is flawed… it’s the acronym that is doomed. Let’s face it, “SaaS and “PaaS” can be said out loud, but when you say “IaaS” in same way, well, it just doesn’t work. I’m reminded about something my mother once told me about what happens when I assume."

He goes on to outline three options.

1. Migrate from IaaS to CaaS and make Verizon’s day (CaaS is Computing as a service, and what Verison calls their IaaS service)
   
2. Consolidate IaaS and PaaS into just PaaS, as the distinction between these two is getting blurrier as offerings from Amazon and Microsoft’s Azure evolve.
3. Replace IaaS with another term that’s not a “C”… but what? I spent some time looking at synonyms for the word “infrastructure” but just didn’t see anything that worked really well.
   

Actually, I quite agree with Beil's assertion. As far as acronyms go, IaaS is about as bad as they get. The fact that your infrastructure is provided "as a service" is an obviously important aspect, but in reality it's not the only or most important driver when looking at implementing a cloud like infrastructure. API's and other various "web services" are quickly becoming pervasive, just about everything built recently is being provided as a service, or has some kind of web services available. And if by chance it doesn't, then you're probably going to steer clear anyway. I'd say things like scalability, elasticity, federation, application efficiency, metering/chargeback, self service access, open api's and system automation are just as important if not more. So I ask, how important is it that your infrastructure is described as a service?

At Enomaly we've chosen to use the "elastic computing" term instead of either IaaS or Cloud Computing directly. But like most, from a marketing point of view we do refer to both terms within our various materials. As a fad or marketing position, the term cloud computing is about as popular as they come with anything as a service not far behind.

Read the original blog entry...