Glossary
Plain‑English definitions of the software‑outsourcing, AI, cloud and legal terms used across Vietnam Tech Partners. Where useful, each links to a deeper guide in our Knowledge hub.
Engagement & hiring
- Capability verification
- Confirming a vendor’s real attributes — legal registration, delivery evidence, certifications — before listing them, rather than relying on reviews. See our methodology.
- Capability score
- A score computed from verifiable signals (technologies, certifications, delivery, security) for an area such as AI or cloud. Missing data is re‑weighted, never invented.
- Dedicated team
- A vendor‑managed team working on your project ongoing; the vendor handles delivery, management and continuity.
- Staff augmentation
- Adding individual engineers to your own team; you manage delivery while they integrate with your processes.
- Employer of Record (EOR)
- A third party that legally employs engineers on your behalf, handling payroll, social insurance and compliance; the loaded cost is higher than the headline salary.
- Total cost of ownership (TCO)
- The full cost of an engagement — rate plus management, QA, ramp‑up and rework — typically well above the hourly rate. See the buyer’s guide.
- Attrition
- The rate at which engineers leave; high attrition forces costly re‑ramping and loss of project context.
- 13th‑month salary
- An expected extra month of pay common in Vietnam, usually around year‑end; budget for it in retention planning.
AI & data
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Software that performs tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as understanding language or recognising images.
- Machine learning (ML)
- A branch of AI where systems learn patterns from data rather than being explicitly programmed.
- Large language model (LLM)
- A model trained on large text corpora to understand and generate natural language; the basis of many modern AI products.
- Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG)
- A technique that grounds an LLM’s answers in your own documents or data, improving accuracy and reducing hallucination.
- Natural language processing (NLP)
- AI focused on understanding and generating human language — search, chat, translation, summarisation.
- Computer vision (CV)
- AI that interprets images and video — detection, OCR, quality inspection and similar tasks.
- MLOps
- The practice of deploying, monitoring and maintaining ML models reliably in production. See hiring AI engineers.
- Data engineering
- Building the pipelines, storage and feature systems that make data usable for analytics and ML.
- Data annotation
- Labelling data (images, text, audio) to create high‑quality training sets for ML.
Cloud & DevOps
- Cloud migration
- Moving applications and data to cloud (or hybrid) infrastructure — by lift‑and‑shift, re‑platforming or re‑architecting. See the cloud & DevOps guide.
- DevOps
- Practices that unite development and operations to ship software faster and more reliably through automation.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Defining infrastructure in version‑controlled files (e.g. Terraform) so environments are reproducible and auditable.
- CI/CD
- Continuous integration and continuous delivery — automated pipelines that build, test and deploy code.
- Kubernetes
- An open‑source platform for orchestrating containerised applications, including scaling and rolling releases.
- Hyperscaler
- A global‑scale cloud provider — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.
- Site reliability engineering (SRE)
- An engineering discipline that applies software practices to operations, focusing on reliability targets and on‑call response.
- FinOps
- Managing and optimising cloud spend as an ongoing engineering and finance practice.
- Observability
- The ability to understand a system’s state from its outputs — metrics, logs and traces — to detect and resolve issues.
Legal & compliance
- IP assignment
- A contract clause transferring ownership of created work and intellectual property to the client. See protecting your IP.
- NDA (non‑disclosure agreement)
- A contract protecting confidential information shared during an engagement.
- Work made for hire
- A US legal concept for ownership of commissioned work; under Vietnamese law, use an explicit written IP‑assignment clause rather than relying on it.
- Berne Convention
- An international treaty under which copyright (including software) is recognised automatically among member countries, including Vietnam.
- TRIPS
- The WTO Agreement on Trade‑Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, setting minimum IP‑protection standards Vietnam is bound by.
- Data residency / localization
- Rules requiring certain data to be stored within a country. In Vietnam, Decree 53/2022 requires some data classes to remain onshore.
- PDPD (Decree 13/2023)
- Vietnam’s Personal Data Protection Decree, in force since July 2023 — its first comprehensive personal‑data law.
How we describe our work
- Pay‑to‑play
- Paying to obtain or improve a listing, score or ranking. VTPN does not do this — placement is earned through verification.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- Optimising content so AI answer engines can cite it accurately — clear answers, statistics, citations and structured data.
- AIO (AI optimization)
- Structuring content and schema so AI systems can understand and surface it, complementing traditional SEO.