EaaS: Everything-as-a-Service

A Guide to Delineating Between Services, When Everything Is Labeled as One.

The year is now 2019, and we are fast approaching two whole decades in the 21st-century world. Changes have occurred at enormous scale since the early 2000s, across nearly every industry, sector, and vertical. Technology and its use in both business and everyday life has skyrocketed. Web 2.0 has come and gone, and we’re in the heart of digital transformation maturity. Everything is digital, and everything is a service.

But what does this all really mean? And what is a service? In the tech space, words like service, digital, platform, “big” data, analytics, and robotics get thrown around quite often. They have become buzzwords — overused, sometimes wrongfully applied, and downright bastardized. Each one of the aforementioned terms could have a guide of its own, but today we’re going to focus on services.

In general, the word is a mess. Merriam-Webster has 11 different definitions for the word alone, and that is only for the noun format. Tack on adjectives and verbs, and you have a plethora of meanings for service. Without setting the proper context, you can see how easy it could be to misconstrue the meaning. And in a typical business, where many domains converge (think design, technology, marketing, sales, finance…