A number of claims have been made for software as a service (SaaS) in recent years: for example, that it spells the death of packaged software (true, in most cases); and that it will bring the major ERP and CRM vendors, such as Oracle and SAP, to their knees. This is unlikely, as Oracle's Larry Ellison is a major investor in both Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

But NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson held the stage in San Francisco last night with a new claim on the decade-long roster of future promises: that it will disintermediate the management consultants and systems integrators that companies employ to bolt together all those disparate systems we buy, inherit, or have foisted upon us in the quest for global business insight.

The event was the global launch of NetSuite's OneWorld system in a hall in the Embarcadero region of the city. The idea of OneWorld – essentially a productised and well-branded version of NetSuite's latest upgrades – is that it promises a global, real-time, customisable view of all of your organisation's transactions and business processes, across all your subsidiaries, within each native language, currency, and taxation regime, and all within a single instance of NetSuite.

That's a compelling proposition, especially for all those companies trying to unravel what Nelson calls the “hairball” of disparate, poorly integrated systems within each business – let alone each country, region, and worldwide.

What most companies do when faced with the systems hairball is reach for the Gaviscon (other antacids are available), dial a passing management consultant and cough up a six-figure sum at him to make it all go away. On-demand computing and SaaS (Internet-based business insight systems with the promised ease of use of a Facebook or an Amazon) promise to tear up that six-figure cheque.

Of course, all the big consultancies have responded by opening SaaS and on-demand practices, at least partly to explain what the terms mean to all those organisations and businesses who are also choking on the hairball of technology acronyms and buzzwords.

So despite grappling with a dodgy mic, Nelson's message was intended to be clear: why not have one, easy-to-use business system at a fraction of the price? But what he actually said, before moving onto the important stuff, was: “The next catalyst for the company as you look through that timeline of history” he explained, is “cloud computing”.

Rather than plumping, 'Call My Bluff' style, for linguistic clarity to match the simplicity of the OneWorld idea, Nelson (like Marc Benioff, Greg Gianforte and other SaaS luminaries) has adopted the term 'cloud computing' to mean anything delivered over the Internet as a service.

Why? This is guaranteed to confuse the very business people that NetSuite, Salesforce.com, RightNow and other SaaS vendors need on-side to see off the threat of Microsoft's 'deliver everything via Outlook' approach to business insight. Most people like and use what they already know and are familiar with, while IT people do love to obfuscate.

Cloud computing actually means devoting shared, peer-to-peer networked resources to solving large number-crunching problems, so why confuse it with SaaS and on-demand computing and send all those potential customers scurrying off to Wikipedia?

SaaS companies already face organisational problems within some customer companies: CEOs like SaaS because it tells them what they need to know, and it doesn't mean rebuilding the business around some unwieldy enterprise app that stifles the will to live; many CIOs hate SaaS because they're supposed to tell the CEO what he needs to know, and the last thing CIOs want is a system that anyone can access and use; IT workers hate SaaS because it leaves them with nothing to do or render baffling, tedious and arcane; and the average knowledge worker loves it, for the same reasons as the CEO. That spells trouble at the heart of the business.

For many customers, there are also risks in basing the business on a hosted solution – is there a back-up datacentre, and if so, where is it? For some organisations culturally, that is not necessarily better than betting the farm on a huge, on-premise enterprise system.

Nelson loves the terms “the Fortune five million”, meaning those millions of organisations that aren't globe-straddling multinationals, but who drive the economy in all parts of the world. For those companies (and others), OneWorld is a compelling idea, and one that works – at least in the context of a live, staged demo. The best way to capitalise on that is to keep it simple, and resist the age-old urge of the software industry to mystify and entrance, just as the Church did in medieval times by conducting services in Latin.

In this day and age one person's Internet-enabled big idea can pack a punch as powerful as a multinational, and Nelson would do well to play to those strengths. “In Germany you probably use something like SAP just to be patriotic,” he quipped, rightly going after the big targets. However, most of the SaaS players are taking shots at each other rather than at the alternative business model.

So listen up Messrs. Nelson, Benioff and Gianforte: keep it simple, resist that preternatural urge of the software tycoon to baffle with irrelevant and poorly chosen buzzwords, and you might just win the custom of the Fortune Five Million.