Six Degrees Group ‘Jargon junkies’

The cloud technology industry is awash with confusing jargon. Six Degrees Group launched a microsite to bring clarity to the sector

ix Degrees Group is a privately owned managed data services provider serving UK mid-market customers. It has a converged services portfolio – including data centre, connectivity, voice and cloud offerings – designed to help companies meet the challenges of a connected world.

The challenge: Clarity
If you asked someone on the street to choose three groups of professions noted for their ability to use jargon and waffle to confuse and bemuse people, you might think he or she would pick lawyers, bankers and politicians. You might expect a similar result from a collection of business people, so it says something about the state of the IT industry that technology companies fared much worse than all three of those professions in a recent poll conducted by Six Degrees Group.

Six Degrees Group, well aware of the fact ‘jargon junkies’ at technology companies were guilty of using confusing words and acronyms, was concerned about the affect jargon could be having on the cloud technology industry. 

A confused market doesn’t buy; it waits. With this in mind Six Degrees Group vowed to assess the severity of the problem and come up with a solution that would help to educate businesses about cloud technology, reduce the jargon, simplify decision making and regain credibility for the IT sector.

The solution: Uptothecloud
Six Degrees Group conducted a research project to investigate the problem. The company asked 100 business and 100 IT decision makers questions regarding cloud computing. Respondents were from commercial organisations with 1000 plus employees in the UK.

While the majority of IT decision makers (83 per cent) have a broad understanding of the concept of cloud computing, they are struggling to cut across the marketing hype and messages. For example:

• Platform as a Service (PaaS) – 22 per cent believed PaaS was a new philosophy for railway management.

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – 12 per cent of respondents felt that IaaS was a new road-building technology.

• Cloud computing – 15 per cent believed ‘cloud computing’ was a new free internet service.

To tackle these misconceptions Six Degrees Group developed and launched the microsite uptothecloud.co.uk in March. The site was designed to encourage IT professionals to engage in a healthy debate about the industry and contained useful tools to help businesses understand the ideal solution for their needs, instead of forcing a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.

Crucially, although uptothecloud.co.uk sits on the Six Degrees Group website, it is not a blatant sales tool. Instead it will recommend services that Six Degrees Group might not necessarily provide, if that is what is best for the business in question. The key is to help educate businesses on what the cloud really is and what it has to offer.

A targeted B2B PR campaign introduced uptothecloud.co.uk to the IT and business press; generating hype around the website’s launch and the reason such a site was necessary. An infographic was designed to aid the PR campaign and illustrate the results of the research.

The results
Uptothecloud.co.uk received enthusiasm from the media and experienced a successful launch with impressive traffic statistics in the first weeks:

• Over 200 visits in the first week of launch.

• 25 per cent of all web traffic completed a cloud decision tree.

•Over 80 file downloads from the cloud knowledge resource pool.

• The cloud technology section is the most popular resource, boasting 30 per cent of all downloads.

Already the decision-helping tools on the website are translating into direct customer enquiries, bringing Six Degrees Group in line with its financial targets for 2013. 

Campbell Williams, group strategy and marketing director at Six Degrees Group, commented: “Since launch, uptothecloud.co.uk has already helped numerous business decision makers to make sense of the cloud. This will help bring back credibility to the cloud technology industry. Our research has allowed us to highlight the obvious flaws in the market and then help educate the business community.

“Educational tools such as uptothecloud.co.uk are essential to improve market growth in the long run. In the future we are looking forward to helping the microsite develop, encouraging debates and third-party blog posts.”