Thursday, December 15, 2011

All You Need To Know About Managed Services - Elements Magazine - Issue 004

The other day my son came to me and told me that I had to listen to a musicianʼs music because they were “sick.” Immediately, I thought how unfortunate it was that such a young and talented person be afflicted with an illness. Of course, my son corrected me, while making fun of my age, by explaining that “sick” meant they were really good and not dying of a horrible disease as I had first thought.

This made me think back to my childhood. The terms we used confused the adults, they were disconnected from our youth culture as well. Then I realized that youth culture, and culture in general, continually takes over words and phrases so that their meaning evolves.

The IT world is not unlike any other “scene” in the modern day. For example, we now speak of Cloud in passing conversation knowing exactly what it is and what its implications are. However, our parentʼs generation may have visions of us taking paper files and somehow launching them into the stratosphere, thus creating “storage in the cloud.”

My question is, how does one differentiate terms and their meanings if they evolve at such a fast rate? Look at the term “Hosted Services.” Can anyone in this day and age place a true meaning on the term? Or is this a term like “sick” that we all have to decipher? At Nitro, we obviously offer Hosted Services; some people might refer to it as Professional Services, and some people might not know what either term means.

Further, although we speak of “Hosted,” some people think of “Cloud” as we can store our files remotely.

In all, this issue outlines multiple aspects and meanings of the term Hosted Services. I encourage you to read these articles and determine their meaning for yourself. I also invite you to read about Nitroʼs Hosted Services as a comparative. At some point, perhaps we can all come to a conclusion as to what these terms mean to all of us.

Now, I must return to my youth-to-adult language dictionary to translate what my kids want for dinner.

Sincerely,
Larry Poirier
Chief Executive Officer
Nitro IT Business Solutions

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