Is Vendor Obfuscation a Strategy?

Almost irresistible, aren’t they?

Another industry practice that makes it difficult for customers to make sense of all of the products and services being offered is the habit of many IT vendors and consultants to define their market using their own terminology and acronyms, even when the proliferation of jargon and acronyms makes their own material almost undecipherable.

That has led to a bevy of phrases that describe similar products, such as corporate performance management (CPM), business performance management (BPM) and enterprise performance management (EPM). Frankly, journalists and CIOs are better served by fewer descriptions of similar products to make the job of comparing products easier.

In April, we asked CIOs who read CIO Insight what they think of all of this industry jargon, as part of a longer online survey. The result: CIOs do not respond well to all of this obfuscation.

Ninety-one percent (of 282 respondents) said vendors give different names to products and services that largely do the same thing, and 68 percent said vendor jargon makes it difficult for them to conduct apples-to-apples comparisons of IT products or services.

Larger companies were most bothered by this practice, with 74 percent saying it makes their job harder. And it’s probably not a surprise that IT executives at computer manufacturing companies were the least troubled by this (53 percent).

Why do so many industry players adopt such language? Could it be that they don’t want to make it easy for their customers to make comparisons? Seems like a golden opportunity for vendors who care about their customers to be plain-spoken, and to talk clearly about business benefits in their messaging rather than muddying the waters.

But maybe clarity isn’t what they’re after.

Ellen Pearlman is editor-in-chief of CIO Insight magazine.