On premises

[Michael A. Lowry]

In a thread about CA’s intended acquisition of Automic, Timothy Dodd wrote:

And here is the official letter to customers...

This letter contains a mistake I have seen several times lately, often in the English language communications of primarily German-speaking companies: the term ‘on-premises’ is misspelled as ‘on-premise.’ I thought I would take this opportunity to explain the source of the confusion and illustrate the correct usage of the term.

The word premise is unusual in the following respect: the plural form has an additional meaning that the singular form lacks.

In its singular form, premise, the word means ‘a proposition supporting or helping to support a conclusion.’ This form of the word is often used in discussions of logic, and in legal settings. The plural form, premises, can mean one of two things. First, it can be the plural of the above singular meaning. Second, the plural form premises can mean ‘a tract of land including its buildings.’

One sees this second meaning often these days, in discussions about ‘cloud-ready’ apps — those that can run just as well on on computing resources directly owned by a company, and those hosted by an external cloud computing provider. Here is an example of how to use the term correctly in such a context:

Our workload management solutions help you get the most of of your business applications, whether they run on-premises, or in the cloud.

Here endeth the lesson. Go in peace and sin no more. ;)

[Michael A. Lowry]

The main marketing page for AWA also contains the aforementioned error in a section heading:

The benefits of Automic Workload Automation on-premise, hybrid or in the cloud

This should obviously be

The benefits of Automic Workload Automation on-premises, hybrid or in the cloud

[Octavie_Chakoute_1958]

Thanks Michael.
I'll get someone from the Marketing take a look to this.

Tiffany

,

Valia

[Michael A. Lowry]

This spelling error now appears to have made its way into the name of a product in both the Downloads page and the Compatibility Checker.

Obviously this product should be named Analytics On Premises.

[Pete Wirfs]

According to this 2014 blog, the IT industry began this behavior several years ago.  It's not just Automic.  (Doesn't make it grammatically correct though.)

http://www.brianmadden.com/opinion/So-apparently-we-lost-the-grammar-war-and-on-premises-is-just-called-on-premise-now

[Michael A. Lowry]

I'm not a language proscriptivist. Languages evolve; the question is whether the changes maintain consistency, improve expressiveness, and do not create unnecessary confusion.

I don't have a problem, for example, with the abbreviation ‘prem’ in place of ‘premises’ in terms like ‘on premises’,  because it's a new word and not likely to be confused with another word that has a different meaning.