Recently, I have been delving into the deep dark world that is corporate jargon. Another way to phrase this jargon is “soul-sucking phraseology.” Yet another way to phrase “soul-sucking phraseology” is “buzzwords”. Let’s take a look at some frequently encountered buzzwords, and see how they make us feel.

Product: A nebulous thing that the customer will never see. If the customer manages to buy the “product” he will never use it.

Cloud: Ohhhhh yes, one of those fluffy white things. Ahhh don’t you feel so safe and warm and fuzzy inside?

Cloud-native: Native to the cloud, duh!

Cloud-agnostic: Agnostic to “The Cloud.” Not to be confused with just agnostic.

Scalable: from scale, meaning weighing device, and able, meaning ability. So I suppose this means the ability of a person to step on a scale, thus weighing themselves. No, just kidding, it means something entirely different.

Horizontally scalable: from scalable, meaning weighable, and horizontal, meaning horizontal. Example usage: “It turns out that with enough cheesecake, anyone is infinitely horizontally scalable.” Just kidding. It means something entirely different.

Hybrid Cloud: I still don’t know what this means.

On-prem: Short for on-premise. No humor here, it’s what it sounds like. On. Premise. The Premises. On the property.

On-prem Cloud: Oh yes, here’s that Cloud word again. My very own cloud. On the premises.

Cluster: A plurality of computing devices. Typically run in another vendor’s “cloud.” You can also have these on-prem.

Liquid Software: I encountered this one today, and I really like it. It evokes imagery of other liquid-y things that shouldn’t be liquid.

Solution: Something that is typically so fraught with problems that only an enterprise salesman could actually spin it as a solution, let alone convince anyone to pay for it. Never fear, this happens WAAAAAAAAY more often than you would think.

SaaS: Pronounced sass. Not to be confused with SASE, pronounced sassy. SaaS means software as a service. It’s a mere building block of other, more impressive “buzz phrases”.

Tenant: Somebody that landlords hate.

Single-tenant: It’s like you only have one tenant in your house.

Multi-tenant: It’s like you have many tenants in your house. But the trick is that each tenant has to think that they are the only one in the house. Where it gets really tricky is when the tenants demand “compliance.” This usually means you have to pretend that you’re actually fitting them all in one house, but you actually made houses for each tenant to live. So you’re pretending that they’re all in different houses, in one house, in different houses. Or something.

Compliance: Something usually involving 500 page documents and very expensive auditors.

Kubernetes: Manage your on-prem clusters with this. Also manage your hybrid cloud clusters with this. Also manage other people’s clusters with this. Get thrown in jail because you hacked other people’s clusters. Friends don’t let friends hack clusters. Nerd clusters. I’m talking about the candy now. Chocolate peanut clusters. Cloisters. Monks. Ok. Are you still reading? You should stop now.

Agile: A term corporations who aren’t actually agile use.

Value: Something something blah blah blah. This might include something to do with compliance.

Time-to-value: What does it sound like? Time to value. The faster the better. Maximum fast is usually about 2 quarters.

Leverage: Fancy word for “use”

Stakeholder: Not to be confused with “steak holder.” A stakeholder is a person who “leverages” the “product.” (Read: A stakeholder is a person who pretends to leverage the “product”)

With these few short words you too can become an expert at corporate jingoism! Try out the following sample phrases.

• “We are leveraging compliant liquid software in our multi-tenant cloud solution.”
• “Our multi-tenant cloud solution is infinitely horizontally scalable, thanks to Kubernetes.”
• “Because our solution runs in Kubernetes, that means that you can run it on-prem, in a hybrid cloud, or in your own cloud.”
• “Our product is cloud-native!”
• “Thanks to Kubernetes, our product is cloud-agnostic.”
• “Some tenants require a compliant hybrid cloud solution.”
• “You can leverage our liquid software in a Kubernetes cluster on-prem to provide an infinitely scalable solution that provides faster than ever time-to-value.”
• “Our product is SaaS, which enables us to leverage liquid software to be more agile.”
• “Leverage the capabilities of a cloud-native solution to bring compliance to the table for stakeholders.”

Congratulations! You are now a master of the art of buzzwords.

Disclaimer: This is a rant, and is not accurate information about the state of information technology.