- of
1. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra: "Why should the government pay for and build infrastructure that is available for free? The federal government must buy smarter."
2. In 1961, Stanford professor John McCarthy was one of the first to suggest a time-share, service bureau computing model.
3. J.C.R. Licklider, a key man at ARPANET, predicted an "intergalactic computer network" from which users could access data or programs anytime, anywhere.
4. The concept outpaced technological capabilities of the time and stalled out by the 1970s.
5. Advances in hardware, software and networking brought the rise of application service providers in the 1990s.
6. The plan: offer applications on demand via a standard protocol such as HTTP, even though many applications performed poorly when so used.
7. "Analysts are projecting that revenues in the ASP sector will reach $23 billion dollars by the end of 2003." -- Wired, December 2000.
8. Instead, high-flying ASPs like USinternetworking crashed with the dotcoms; USi was purchased by AT&T after emerging from bankruptcy.
9. "Software as a Service" and "cloud computing" are often used interchangeably; Gartner says cloud computing offers "massively scalable" capabilities including platform, infrastructure, etc.
10. In A 1996 paper, The Self-governing Internet: Coordination by Design, MIT researchers used the term "cloud" to describe foundational elements of today's movement.
11. In 1997, the firm NetCentric tried to trademark the term "cloud computing," but gave up the effort two years later.
12. Dell tried the same stunt a decade later, failed.
13. A 1998 book, The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, described "a universal source of pervasive and dependable computing power that supports dramatically new classes of applications."
14. IBM researcher Judith Myerson: cloud computing takes the grid a step further with on-demand resource provisioning.
15. Myerson: "This eliminates over-provisioning when used with utility pricing. It also removes the need to over-provision in order to meet the demands of millions of users."
16. Amazon Elastic Compute was the first major cloud computing service to embrace the cloud terminology.
17. Google's Eric Schmidt stole Amazon's thunder by using the term "cloud computing" in an August 2006 speech just weeks before EC2's unveiling.
18. At the time, experts wondered whether "cloud" would stick as an industry buzzword.
19. In September 2009, Amazon EC2 launched more than 50,000 virtual machine instances in a 24-hour period within a single region.
20. At the time, cloud researcher Guy Rosen estimated that EC2 had launched 8.4 million instances since its inception.
21. Google's entree into the enterprise cloud marketplace came with the February 2007 launch of Google Apps Premier Edition.
22. In late 2009 the city of Los Angeles reported that it will likely save $5 million by switching from Novell's GroupWise desktop software to cloud-based Google Apps.
23. Google Apps Marketplace, announced March 2010, lets users discover and deploy third-party cloud applications that integrate with their existing Google Apps accounts.
24. Microsoft launched the Windows Azure Platform in February 2010, promising "a wide range of Internet services that can be consumed from both on-premises environments or the Internet."
25. Apple's 500,000-sq.-ft. data center under construction in Maiden, N.C. is purportedly part of its future cloud computing offerings.
26. Oracle's Larry Ellison, September 2009: "The cloud is water vapor. All it is is a computer attached to the network. You still need databases, and memory and microprocessors."
27: Ellison: "Cloud computing is not only the future of computing, but the present and the entire past of computing."
28. A recent ISACA survey of 1,800 IT pros found that only 10% of them plan to use cloud computing for mission-critical IT services.
29. 45% of those surveyed by ISACA believe the risks of cloud computing outweigh the benefits.
30. Yankee Group recently reported that 75% of enterprises say they are earmarking no more than a third of their 2010 IT budgets to the cloud.
31. IDC predicts that public cloud computing will be a $44 billion market by 2013.
32. Research and Markets analysts are more bullish, expecting cloud computing to be a $160.2 billion market by 2015.
33. DC says Web Apps and Collaboration tools are the top two areas for cloud model adoption.
34. Data and content related uses are the next big drivers according to IDC, including back-up, distribution and storage.
35. A late 2009 survey by Taneja Group found that 92% of Test/Dev operations are using shared infrastructures, or "private" clouds.
36. 76% of respondents use shared infrastructures or private clouds not only for Test/Dev, but also for production enterprise applications such as CRM, finance and Web applications.
37. Of those, 30% are sharing resource pools between both Test/Dev and production applications, indicating a rising comfort level with sharing infrastructure within IT departments overall.
38. In September 2009, the federal government launched Apps.gov, a GSA-operated Web site that government agencies can use to buy and deploy cloud computing applications.
39. IBM is working on a computing system dubbed Project Kittyhawk that would be capable of hosting the entire Internet as an application.
40. "We're a long way from knowing how the economic and political consequences of this new machinery will play out" - Nicholas Carr, author, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.
Innovation 
10 Ways to Work With People You Hate
How You Spend $120,000 on Coffee and Lunch
Five Terrible Excuses for Being Late to Work
10 Outrageous Expense Report Items
10 Business Lessons from the Super Bowl
Businesses Learn to Love Consumer IT
See All Slideshows
