The accelerated pace of technology development has brought about a deluge of confusing buzzwords. Even if you came to the smart conclusion that technology is key to your today’s competitive strategy, crafting that strategy and finding suitable vendor partners to execute it is increasingly difficult. Not only do you have to understand a growing list of new topics and capabilities, you have to wade through the marketing hype to avoid spending money and effort on froth.
Put your Big Data in the Cloud! Get off your SAAS! 
Okay, no one actually says that last one, but does any actually understand what half this stuff means? Let me let you in on a little secret…that’s the point. In the face of a hash tag cloud of confusion it’s tough to make decisions. And that confusion is what marketers prey on.
My favorite example from the software integration world is…
Look How Easily We Integrate with SAAS Applications!
If you have searched integration software in the past year, you’ve most likely seen marketing buzz around how easy some of them can connect to the latest SAAS applications. Let’s be clear, there is little magic in simply connecting to something that by definition makes connections easy. See, SAAS applications (Salesforce, Workday etc.) get their scale by being standardized across the board and easy to deal with. So a vendor marketing that they connect to SAAS easily says more about the SAAS provider than it does about the integration vendor. That being said, if the vendor can simplify how the data from the SAAS application is managed and how it is harmonized with your legacy systems, now we’re talking about enablement via SAAS.
If you do it right, you may even be able to leverage big data analysis in the cloud through integration of legacy infrastructure with your SAAS footprint. But the simple connection to your SAAS applications is a small step in that journey.
