An alien reading today's IT industry and business reporting would be hard-pressed to define IT as anything other than the latest "app" and the "cloud," lurching from one security breach to the next. Most Cutter IT Journal readers should know better. The realm of IT is vast, and expanding, as more and more of our analog world is reduced to bits rather than atoms. One way to make sense of the vastness is to use a layered abstraction, which I call the uber-stack.