Every term, abbreviation, and concept used in the dashboard, organized by category.
Business & Financial
ARR
Annual Recurring Revenue. The yearly value of subscription contracts. A customer paying $100K/month has $1.2M ARR. The standard SaaS metric for measuring business scale.
CAGR
Compound Annual Growth Rate. The average yearly growth rate of a market or metric over a period. A market growing from $5B to $24B over 5 years has ~37% CAGR.
TAM
Total Addressable Market. The total revenue opportunity if Scramble captured 100% of every relevant market segment. It's the theoretical ceiling — useful for showing the size of the opportunity, not a realistic revenue target.
SAM
Serviceable Addressable Market. The portion of the TAM that Scramble can actually serve given its product focus (multi-country, IaC-mature, 5K+ employees). Smaller than TAM but more realistic.
SOM
Serviceable Obtainable Market. The portion of the SAM that Scramble can realistically capture in a specific timeframe. Based on sales capacity, win rates, and market penetration. This is the actual revenue target.
Beachhead
The first target market segment for initial market entry. Scramble's beachhead is European Financial Services — chosen because they have the strongest combination of regulatory pressure (EU AI Act, DORA, GDPR), multi-country operations, and Azure adoption.
Land-and-Expand
A sales motion where you enter ("land") an account with a small, low-risk engagement (X-Ray Discovery for €13,800) and then grow ("expand") into larger contracts as the customer sees value (taxonomy, policy, cost attribution — toward $500K–$1.5M ARR).
POC
Proof of Concept. A time-limited engagement (typically 30 days) where the product is deployed on a prospect's real infrastructure to prove value before a purchase decision.
TTV
Time to Value. How quickly a customer sees meaningful results after starting to use the product. For Scramble, X-Ray Discovery provides TTV in hours — first scan reveals unknown infrastructure immediately.
SI
Systems Integrator. Large consulting firms (Avanade, Accenture, Big 4) that implement technology solutions for enterprises. SIs are channel partners that can recommend and deploy Scramble within their client accounts.
Technical & Product
IaC
Infrastructure as Code. Managing cloud infrastructure (servers, networks, databases) through code files rather than manual UI clicks. Tools: Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, OpenTofu. Scramble governs infrastructure whether or not it was created through IaC.
IDP
Internal Developer Platform. A self-service layer that lets developers provision and manage infrastructure without directly using IaC tools. Tools: Backstage, Port, Humanitec. Scramble provides the governance layer above IDPs.
OPA / Rego
Open Policy Agent / Rego language. An open-source policy engine and its query language for defining rules. "No public-facing databases in production" can be expressed as OPA policy. Scramble supports both OPA/Rego and JavaScript for policy, giving flexibility.
RBAC
Role-Based Access Control. Controlling who can do what based on their role (admin, developer, viewer). Scramble's RBAC is scoped to the 5-level taxonomy — e.g., "admin for the French payments division" is a single permission, not a manual mapping.
K8s
Kubernetes. A container orchestration platform for running applications in production. Some competitors (Humanitec) are K8s-centric. Scramble is infrastructure-agnostic — it governs VMs, serverless, and K8s resources alike.
OpenTofu
An open-source fork of Terraform created after HashiCorp changed Terraform's license. The IBM/HashiCorp acquisition ($6.4B) accelerated migration to OpenTofu. Scramble is IaC-engine-agnostic — it works regardless of which IaC tool is used.
OSS
Open-Source Software. Software with publicly available source code. Backstage has 89% OSS market share in developer portals. Scramble leverages OSS components ($35–70M equivalent R&D value) but is a commercial product.
Scramble Concepts
5-Level Taxonomy
Scramble's organizational model: Business Line > Country > Domain > Application > Service. Every resource, policy, cost, and event is scoped to this structure. Competitors typically have 0–3 levels. This is Scramble's most fundamental structural advantage.
X-Ray Discovery
Scramble's autonomous cloud scanning engine. Connects to cloud APIs (Azure today) and discovers all resources — including those not managed by any IaC tool ("shadow infrastructure"). This is the "land" in land-and-expand: first scan reveals what you didn't know you had.
Dual Policy Engine
Scramble supports both JavaScript and OPA/Rego for writing policy rules. JavaScript lowers the barrier (most teams know JS). OPA/Rego provides industry-standard rigor. Both evaluate against the full taxonomy context (country, business line, etc.).
Event Envelopes
Every write action in Scramble produces a typed, versioned, tenant-scoped event. This creates an automatic audit trail — who changed what, when, under which policy, in which jurisdiction. Competitors use webhooks (unstructured) or have no event architecture.
Agent Governance
A framework for governing AI agents that operate on infrastructure. Includes identity (who is this agent?), autonomy tiers (what can it do without approval?), kill switches (how to stop it), and taxonomy-scoped permissions (what resources can it touch?). Positioned for EU AI Act compliance.
Governance Runtime
Scramble's category term. A runtime is a continuously running system (vs. a tool you invoke). Scramble continuously discovers, classifies, governs, and accounts for infrastructure — it's "always on" governance, not a point-in-time scan.
Competitor Categories
IaC Orchestration
Tools that manage IaC execution pipelines — running Terraform plans, managing state, scheduling applies. Examples: Spacelift, Env0, Terraform Cloud. Key limitation: only govern infrastructure that flows through their pipeline.
Developer Portal
Tools that provide a self-service catalog for developers to discover and provision services. Examples: Backstage, Port, Cortex, OpsLevel. Key limitation: catalog, not governance — can't enforce policy or discover unknown infrastructure.
Platform Orchestrator
Tools that abstract infrastructure provisioning into developer-friendly workflows. Examples: Humanitec. Key limitation: typically K8s-centric, DX-first rather than governance-first.
DevSecOps Platform
Broad platforms covering CI/CD, security, testing, and deployment. Examples: Harness. Key limitation: governance is one module among many, typically pipeline-scoped with shallow organizational structure.
Regulatory & Compliance
EU AI Act
European Union regulation on artificial intelligence. High-risk AI system requirements become enforceable August 2026. Autonomous agents operating on infrastructure in regulated sectors will need governance frameworks. This creates a hard deadline for Scramble's agent governance positioning.
DORA
Digital Operational Resilience Act. EU regulation requiring financial institutions to ensure ICT resilience. Creates demand for infrastructure governance and audit trails — exactly what Scramble provides.
GDPR
General Data Protection Regulation. EU data privacy law. Relevant because infrastructure hosting personal data must be governed by jurisdiction. Scramble's taxonomy maps resources to countries, enabling jurisdiction-aware compliance.
GRC
Governance, Risk, and Compliance. The enterprise function responsible for ensuring regulatory compliance and managing risk. GRC platforms (ServiceNow GRC, OneTrust) are potential integration partners for Scramble.
Market & Analyst
MQ / Wave
Magic Quadrant (Gartner) / Wave (Forrester). Analyst frameworks that evaluate and rank vendors in a market category. Being included signals market maturity and vendor credibility. Scramble targets MQ/Wave participation at $25M+ ARR.
CNCF
Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Industry body governing cloud-native open-source projects (Kubernetes, Backstage, etc.). Their January 2026 "Four Pillars of Platform Control" report validates infrastructure governance as an emerging category.
FinOps
Cloud Financial Operations. The practice of managing and optimizing cloud spending. Scramble's cost attribution feature maps costs to the 5-level taxonomy, enabling FinOps at the business-structure level rather than just tag-based allocation.