The Official Knowledge as a Service White Paper

"Today’s hot technology trends are hot for a reason. They are the locus of forces around Web 2.0: crowd sourcing, cloud computing, long tail, pull versus push, software as a service, virtualization ... among others. Like vectors on a map, these trends — in their variety, number and alignment — define the dimensions of individual self-enablement in a crowded information space. True, they are oriented toward different needs. But those different orientations allow them to triangulate on a common point. It’s all about how to apply highly dispersed network-based resources in highly scalable numbers in response to a particular individual’s request."

--cumulusIQ white paper

Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) is a trademark-pending concept introduced by my client, cumulusIQ. My task in writing the KaaS white paper was to show that this is not just another made up acronym in search of a definition -- but that it has credible conceptual credentials.


As the rate of change accelerates, people have increasingly less time to find out what they need to know before they need to know it. At some point -- call it the "knowledge singularity" -- it becomes impossible to gain needed knowledge fast enough from either formal training or previously identified knowledge stores. Based on the Internet cloud, KaaS solves that problem, especially in helpdesk and technical support applications.

The white paper makes this case in the face of much bigger players, like salesforce.com, who would like to claim the KaaS mantle for themselves. Having the only white paper that officially says what KaaS is, however, gives my client a big marketing advantage.