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The term on-premise is so widespread in the cloud and data center industry that it barely raises an eyebrow. From television interviews to major conference stages, CIOs, CTOs, and CEOs have long been using on-premise as an established term when discussing digital transformation, data workflows, and where data resides in hybrid cloud architectures.

Indeed, the phrase has become so common that its easy to overlook the fact that on-premise is a grammatically inaccurate truncation of the term on-premises. And while the casual observer might question the importance of a single missing letter, there are still some who marvel at the longevity and great heights that on-premise has achieved.

Related: Cloud Computing vs. On Premises: The Diminishing Differences

For an industry so focused on precision, it is curious that the use of on-premise has become sowidespread. But when did this syllable-shortened alternative slip into common parlance? And does its ongoing usage really matter if the meaning remains?

In acloudand data center context, on-premises refers to a group of servers that a business privately owns and controls. Simply put, the on-premises model refers to servers, data, or an entire data center physically located inside your corporate building.

Related: Rethink Your Data Storage Strategy: Cloud, On-premises, or Hybrid?

Its easy to see why on-prem became a common synonym of this term the handy truncation coming in at a whole two syllables (50%) shorter. Somewhere along the way, however, the phrase on-premise joined the conversation. And this theoretically should have meant something else entirely.

Back when early virtualization evangelist andformer senior VMware technologist Brian Maddenreferenced the on-premise phenomenon in a 2013 blog post, he was stridently against it.

Even today, when I hear on-premise, its still a little bit like fingernails on a chalkboard because grammatically its not correct, said Madden. I was always against it, and at the time I was right-fighting it, and saying everyone should be calling it premi-ses. Why? Because itspremises! Im a rule-follower and a writer, so I like proper grammar!

Madden said he noticed the term gaining momentum in the mid-2010s when Citrix, the Fort Lauderdale-based virtualization software developer began using on-premise and on-premises interchangeably in its technical documentation and other customer-facing materials.

Then around 2018, VMware started mixing the terms together as one and the same before finally going with on premise, in almost every instance, Madden recalls. By that time, I was actually working at VMware and they were exclusively calling it on-premise. I think the change happened because onprem-i-sis, was just a lot of syllables to say, especially if you have to refer to it over and over again during a presentation.

While most people would recognize for allintensivepurposes or bitingmy time as malapropisms, CIOs and even well-known tech CEOs today freely use on-premise.

Which version of on-premises they use can signal how confident the speaker is regarding cloud technologies and digital transformation. IT professionals and C-Suite executives who feel they have a clear vision of the future, will likely useon-premise to showcase their knowledge of their industrys inside baseball lingo, and that they have a sense of where Wayne Gretzkys proverbial hockey puck isgoingto be.

Its also potentially a way for senior executives to telegraph to those who toil amid theserver racks, up and down the hot and cold aisles, that they have a connection to the important work that they do monitoring the environment and maintaining uptime.

There are a couple of things going on with on-premise, explains linguistics professor Betsy Sneller, who studies the evolution of language at Michigan State University. The first is that the truncation of words is super common. And so, for something like on-prem, most people recognize its a truncation. But eventually that truncation can become the actual term that is more commonly used to describe something. Its like using gas instead of gasoline. We know its a word in place of an underlying term, but now gas is a totally acceptable word to use.

Sneller added: There are the people who use on-prem, since they are unlikely to get any reaction to that choice. But its also very common to find people using on-premise who may take a somewhat determined stance. They want you to know they arent going to shrink from using the term they like.

Indeed, many senior executives can confidently and casually say on-premise all day long, knowing that their subordinates are likely to adopt their usage at least temporarily when speaking to leadership, in slide presentations, or in podcast discussions.

Sometimes language is adaptive and sometimes its onomatopoetic, meaning a new word might represent a sound or a new thing but people will also adopt a certain way of speaking to sound hip or in touch with the latest trends, explains Georgetown University emeritus psychology professor Steven Sabat.

Years ago, a former colleague in the psychology department suddenly started saying: Whats the ask? Everyone in the department raised an eyebrow and wondered: What is this person talking about?The ASK?And then before you knew it, the ask had spread around the office and nearly everyone was using it.

While the term may still raise an eyebrow outside the data center and far from tech conference stages, it appears that on-premise is likely here to stay. But does this industry neologism open the door for other data center terms to become part of the public lexicon?

Ira Wells, an assistant professor of literature at the University of Toronto, suggests that during the COVID-19 pandemic, phrases said only at work found their way to the dinner table as people quickly transitioned from video conference calls to family conversations.

If youll recall during the pandemic, we were all pivoting and talking about how many cycles of time we had or didnt have, said Wells. There were other terms during COVIDthat you would hear being thrown around such as cascade, but pivoting was one we heard non-stop.

And just as working from home has persisted beyond the height of the pandemic, business jargon has become a lifestyle choice and an easy shorthand even after the workday has ended.

I find myself using what might be considered office language all the time, continued Wells, whose 2011 PhD thesis at The University of Toronto focused on early American 20th Century literature and how language evolves over time. A lot of people today will say they are going to loop you in or circle back with you, when they just mean they are going to give you a call.

Its this modern professional argot that has ingrained itself in a professional context and is now increasingly used outside the workplace, possibly accelerated by the volume of work calls and work email that people have had to engage with while working from home.

More than a decade since Madden spelled out his skepticism of on-premise, IT professionals will now use all three terms within the same conversation or a single podcast discussion. Others will stick with one version of on-premises and not deviate, no matter which term someone else uses. This can create an awkward situation where a tech podcast host and a guest are using dueling terms to describe the same concept but oddly never mentioning each others word choice.

Anyone listening out for it may start to hear on-premise in everyday parlance either in a discussion with a wedding planneror in some other unexpected context outside discussions of data sovereignty, colocation, or digital transformation. Just as Like and subscribe has become a phrase that most people have heard, on-premise may soon become ingroup slang that becomes hip and coolalong with last years rizz and fax, no printer.

Even so, some IT professionals today still wonder about the right way to say on-premises and exactly when to say it.

Madden, who recently moved to Paris to join the consulting firm ILKI, says he tolerated the use of on-prem, in conversation and in articles written for his now-shuttered website which covered the world of virtualization. If someone wanted to shorten premises to prem, that was clearly easier to say, and it didnt shift the meaning.

Ultimately, however, Madden concedes that Nobody can change what thousands or possibly even millions of technology sector workers are saying.

There are probably hundreds of examples throughout history in every language of words used in an improper way that eventually became common vernacular, he said. Thats just how things go.

Reed Martin is a 1994 graduate of Columbia Journalism School and a veteran technology blogger who wrote about the data center corridor for The Charlotte Observer and catalogued dozens of high availability and disaster recovery best practices in his bookThe Reel Truth: Everything You Didn't Know About Making An Independent Film.Reedis based in Orange County, California.

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The 'On-Premise' Debate: How a Data Center Slang Term Went Mainstream - ITPro Today