Long before NASSCOM coined the encouraging new term --emerging companies-- for small and medium enterprises, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs!) were littering the technology space with jargon. Acronyms and technalese have raised the bar for all senior executives who are already grappling with the issue of adapting rapid technology advancements to business needs. What kind of help do they get from vendors and service providers? Sadly, the marketing of information technology is so replete with technical terms that the marketer, who originally started with the four Ps and Cs, is now spewing an A-Z alphabet soup that no one, including him/her, can actually digest.

To get the best out of the deployment and use of technology, both vendors and customers need to be aware of some general trends in technology speak. Once they recognize these currents, a deliberate and conscious effort to fight habits that have made jargon the bane of this industry can be tackled at every level.

If you want to walk the talk, you will need to speak the talk too:
This mindset is true of every industry. New entrants, aspirants and of course, experts and consultants --no, they are not one and the same! -- are eager to speak the tongue of the techie. Spouting tech jargon pre-supposes knowledge and understanding of the issue. But very often this is not the case.

If you are leading an organization with an increasing global market and are looking for secure and reliable communications, you may well come across marketing brochures offering you an ultimate solution which boasts of features like: "VPNs with IPSec with 3DES encryption and MD5 authentication and PPTP connections for secure and remote access for site to site and teleworkers respectively."

You will however need the assistance of a networking professional to decipher the above techbabble which actually means: Instead of investing in leased lines for wide area communication, you can use public network like the Internet safely and securely. As an extension of the existing point-to-point protocol of the Net, "private tunnels" can be set up to extend the Company's network to a "virtual private network", for the benefit of workers in remote offices as well as for those who work from home.

The problem is two-fold here. The non-techie, who learns to deliver the technology solution verbatim, is seldom able to answer a question on how it actually works. The customer who seeks information from a professional and understands the general concept also picks up the terms. Soon both are speaking geek and Latin, though none among them would be able to explain the nitty gritty if asked. "I am not a technical person," would be the unabashed, if ironical response.

As marketers jump online, there is a mix of business and pleasure giving rise to a new lexicon. This includes terms like viral marketing (marketing through social networking), webinars (custom branded seminars held online) and adgets (local advertising through micro-sites linked to online newspapers).

Lingo misuse and alteration in meaning is adding to confusion
As technical terms are internalised by the IT sector, terms like bandwidth, drivers, and ecosystem have come to mean entirely different things.

Bandwidth for instance is not just about data transfer from point to point in one second. It also means the capacity (in terms of time and resources -- physical, mental and emotional) one has to deal with something. Example: "I don't have the bandwidth to handle this."

A driver is not only a software programme that helps computer programmes interact with a device. And while you may have once been excused for mistaking the word for the chauffeur of your Company-gifted car, you had now better look around for "change agents" as they are the key drivers of business.

With tech-speak merging into business speak, a new entrant is the word ecosystem. It has lent a somewhat universal connotation for an industry: a company is not just part of an industry, but a central entity in a vast ecosystem -- with partners, consumers, competitors and onlookers all around - each of whose actions impact the Company's topline, bottomline, online and what have you.

Some words have been bandied around for so long, that people have stopped noticing that they are being used to express a diametrically opposite meaning. Surely you have come across executives who say "quantum leap" as if it meant a giant stride when in fact it only means a tiny change.

Some terms have now become an object of ridicule as actions have seldom backed them. As Vijaya Mahantesh, an independent IT professional points out, "It is in the pipeline" does not mean much as one is never too sure what is the length of the pipe and the length of the line! "Seamless Integration" has come to mean "occasional irregularity", points out D J Buell, Director, IT, Lithia Motors Inc, Oregon.

Constant abuse of words like value add, value proposition and paradigm shift have rendered them mere platitudes. And of course, just as technology turns obsolete, so do tech terms. Zip drive is out, memory stick and iPod are in. Electronic mail and floppy disk have been replaced by email and flash drive.

How to live with jargon and make the most of it
Can we really wish jargon away? If one were to answer the question honestly, the answer is, "No." For despite its negatives, there are some qualities of technical buzz words that can actually help market an enterprise and its offerings. A technology-savvy image is important for any vendor operating in this space. Here are some pointers on how to survive serving gobbledygeek: