He is considered by many to be the person who brought the idea of cloud computing to the forefront.

He opined that “computation may someday be organized as a public utility.”

He publishes the book “The Challenge of the Computer Utility”. Almost all the modern-day characteristics of cloud computing (elastic provision, provided as a utility, online, illusion of infinite supply), the comparison to the electricity industry and the use of public, private, government and community forms was thoroughly explored .

They published the book “The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure”. The analogy used was of the electricity grid where users could plug into the grid and use a metered utility service. The Grid describes how networks of computers can be made to cooperate and be brought to bear on computationally intensive tasks.

The first scholarly use of the term “cloud computing” was in a 1997 lecture by Ramnath Chellappa where he stated that “…computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits alone…”.

The act describes the legal obligations all organizations in the U.K. have in terms of handling data. The act covers such areas as data collection, data storage and data sharing. The act itself is “policed” by the Information Commissioners Office (ICO). The act covers both electronic and paper data storage.

On hindsight this proved to be proved to be a turning point in the history of cloud computing.

They introduced virtualization to x86 systems to address many of these challenges and transform x86 systems into a general purpose, shared hardware infrastructure that offers full isolation, mobility and operating system choice for application environments.

First IEEE conference held on Grid Computing held in Bangalore, India.

Software & Information Industry Association in a white paper uses the abbreviation SaaS and equates it to Application Service Provider (ASP).

Amazon.com launched its Web services initiatives, allowing customers to integrate its vast online content with their own Web site. These web services expanded over time to cover computing facility on demand.

He published an article in Harvard Business Review titled “IT Doesn’t Matter” and followed up with couple of books titled “Does IT Matter” and “The Big Switch”. The basic proposition is that IT is becoming commoditized and becoming utility like electricity and water.

The first Web 2.0 conference is organized in San Francisco the theme is “The Web As Platform”.

Amazon launched its Elastic Compute cloud (EC2) as a commercial web service that allows small companies and individuals to rent computers on which to run their own computer applications. Launch of S3 – What’s interesting about S3 is that they used the pricing model of “pay-per-use”. This has now become the de facto standard for cloud computing pricing.

Google Docs brought cloud computing to the forefront of public consciousness.

Salesforce launches Force.com, their Platform as a Service offering.

Interest in Cloud Computing picks up. Google Trends show a steady increase in interest starting third quarter of 2007.

This may be triggered by the white paper on cloud computing released IBM which talks about efficiency and innovation that can be achieved through cloud computing.

The pricing was aggressive with a free entry level plan and low cost computing and storage services.

They become the first open source AWS API compatible platform for deploying private clouds.

Cloud Computing is mentioned first time in Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. It is cited as a technology of transformational importance expected to mature in 2-5 years. By the year 2009 it has reached the “Peak of Inflated Expectation”. In 2010, it has started descending towards the “Trough of Disillusionment”. Also, it is shown as two different technologies:

• Cloud Computing
• Cloud and Web Platform

The launch of Azure is a key event in the history of cloud computing with the largest software company making a small but significant shift to the web.

Amazon adds manageability, auto scalability and load balancing feature.

Several improvements were announced which included EC2 Spot Instance, EC2 Cluster Compute Instance and PCI compliance and ISO 27001 certification.

Many improvements – no major feature addition

Commercial version was released.

Acquired Heraku to add Ruby – Platform as a Service to its list of offering.