The Techno-Babble Dictionary: Introduction

By Naomi Dolin-Aubertin

Do you sometimes feel like IT these days throws a bunch of catch phrases and acronyms at you? Do you feel entirely overwhelmed in a changing tech world where concepts like "the cloud" are bandied about with little explanation for how they work? Yep, I'm right there with you. Fortunately, I've got the skinny on a lot of terms trending nowadays in the IT business and I'm going to share some of them today. Let's get ready to techno-babble!

HVoIP: More commonly written as Hosted VoIP it stands for Hosted Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol. It's pretty much what it sounds like: telephone calls (voice) sent through an internet connection. The hosted part means that your phone service is still being monitored (not in an NSA-style!) by a provider whose job it is to provide maintenance and troubleshooting. Your hosting provider also has the ability to add (and remove) new phone lines indefinitely to your account, allowing your business to grow organically. VoIP also negates the need to move phone lines around an office. The overall field of telecommunications is called telephony: "the use or operation of an apparatus ([such] as a telephone) for transmission of sounds as electrical signals between widely removed points."

www.logodesignlove.com

MSP: Managed Service Provider. Like VoIP, this gets thrown around a lot. MSP's are the people who supply you with IT solutions: hosted VoIP, cloud services, etc. Who you gonna call when your fed up with servers and phone lines? Your MSP.

SLA: Service Level Agreement:.

is a part of a service contract where a service is formally defined. In practice, the term SLA is sometimes used to refer to the contracted delivery time (of the service or performance). As an example, Internet service providersand telcos will commonly include service level agreements within the terms of their contracts with customers to define the level(s) of service being sold in plain language terms.

Like any contract, it defines what services will be provided and what compensation will be paid for those services (Hosted VoIP, IT support, etc.).

Next week, we'll move onto some more terms that might have had you scratching your head and running full tilt towards Wikipedia. Until then, to all you SMB's out there: ring up your local MSP and sign an SLA for HVoIP. You'll be glad you did. In the words of the incomparable Dr. Seuss:

You won't lag behind, because you'll have the speed.
You'll pass the whole gang and you'll soon take the lead.
Wherever you fly, you'll be best of the best.
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.