Words aren't only cool, they make you money

OK, so maybe you're not Red Hat and you have to figure out how to make money. Part of your strategy might lie in the words you use.

A few years ago, you could attract venture capital funds by talking about service oriented architectures. Those days may have ended:

The fact of the matter is that SOA is now middle-aged when you consider the maturation of the SOA hype cycle, and at this point most of the better smaller players have either figured out how to become profitable -- thus don't need VC -- or have been purchased....The VC guys have a tendency to spend in areas they collectively consider "emerging"...and thus I'm sure many VC pitches talking about "SOA," "agility," and "reuse" just are not getting the play these days. Moreover, many existing VC-backed SOA companies may find that the money they need just won't be there....

So where is the money going?

[T]here has a been a lot of blogging out there around the shift to cloud computing by the VC, and how everyone who has something resembling software is making a play for the clouds, no matter if they have a legitimate offering or not. Indeed, I'm getting inundated with requests for briefings around "new cloud computing" offerings, typically from companies selling on-premise software just looking to become more relevant.

Well, why don't the SOA companies tell their marketing folks to just re-brand their products as cloud computing solutions? There's a good reason:

Personally, I'm seeing a lot of product management and product marketing people out on the street now, laid off from venture-based SOA startups.

Perhaps I have a personal bias here, but maybe if you kept the marketers on staff, you may continue to be relevant in the future.