Label Mismatch: When Market Terms Don’t Reflect Buyer Reality
Why enterprise buyers ignore cloud labels—and what vendors should say instead.
Enterprise IT buyers don’t shop for “PaaS” or “IaaS.” They shop for outcomes: faster developer onboarding, more secure pipelines, or a platform that integrates with what they already have. But you’d never know that from most vendor decks, analyst reports, or conference stages, where cloud taxonomy still leads—PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, and now “AI Platforms.”
These labels weren’t invented to confuse. Early in the cloud era, they helped categorize emerging services: raw infrastructure (IaaS), developer abstraction layers (PaaS), turnkey apps (SaaS). But the industry moved on. The labels didn’t.
Take OpenShift. It launched as a PaaS, morphed into a Kubernetes platform, and is now pitching itself as hybrid AI infrastructure. Ask a platform engineer what it is, and you’ll likely get a shrug. They care about uptime, integration, and support—whether it’s labeled “PaaS” or “Plumbus” is irrelevant.
Why the Mismatch Persists
On the vendor side, there are real incentives to cling to legacy labels:
Market segmentation: “Platform” implies a bigger TAM than “tool.”
Analyst mapping: No vendor wants to be left out of a Gartner quadrant.
Sales enablement: Categories provide easy scaffolding for pitch decks and sales training.
Add in pressure to fit emerging solutions into existing “hype cycle” frames, and you get an ecosystem more focused on taxonomy than usability.
And Yet, This Is Not How Buyers Buy
In The Buyer Room, I hear the same questions from enterprise leaders again and again:
Will this integrate with what we already use?
Can our team run this, or are we on the hook for new headcount?
Does it simplify our sprawl, or add to it?
Nobody’s debating IaaS vs. PaaS in those rooms. They’re untangling real constraints with budgets, people, and legacy debt.
And when every product gets stuffed into the latest trending label (“AI Platform,” “Data Mesh,” “Zero Trust”), the real differentiators—the features that actually matter—get lost. The result? Buyers delay decisions, confuse categories, or miss solutions that don’t fit the pre-approved script.
What to Do Instead
For enterprise teams:
Define your own categories. Label internal platforms based on what they enable—“Developer Self-Service Portal” is more useful than “Internal PaaS.” Build a service catalog that reflects business outcomes, not vendor taxonomy.
For vendors:
Meet buyers in their messy middle. Instead of chasing the next label, lead with:
Use cases: “Here’s how teams are using this today.”
Integration clarity: “Out-of-the-box support for ServiceNow, Snowflake, and GitHub.”
Operational outcomes: “Reduces onboarding time by 70%” or “Avoids adding FTEs.”
And yes, that may mean challenging your own sales playbooks and retraining go-to-market teams to sell capability over category. But it’s what real differentiation looks like now.
For analyst advisor firms (TAB included):
There’s a role to play too. If you’re still mapping vendors against 2010-era cloud categories, you're not helping. New market dynamics require new frames. Help buyers make sense of reality—not just reinforce what’s easy to group.
The Bigger Picture
We’re past the point where clean labels help. The enterprise landscape is hybrid, composable, integrated, and anything but binary.
When we force fit products into legacy boxes, we flatten their advantages. When analysts and vendors lean too hard on labels, we lose nuance. And when enterprise teams inherit that framing, they make decisions that look good on paper but break down in ops.
It’s time to move past taxonomy and talk plainly about what platforms do—and whether they can be run, scaled, secured, and supported in your environment.