Who Coined "Cloud Computing"?

Proof of concept: George Favaloro poses with a 1996 Compaq business plan. The document is the earliest known use of the term "cloud computing" in print. Antonio Regalado

Now that every innovation company in America seems to be selling cloud computing, Research Review decided to find out where it all began.

The hottest buzzwords in research

Cloud computing is one of the hottest buzzwords in research. It appears 52 million times on the Internet. Nevertheless amidst all the chatter about cloud computing there is one question that has never been answered: Who said it first?

Some accounts trace the birth of the term to just a few years ago, to 2006, when large companies just as Google and Amazon began using "cloud computing" to describe the new paradigm in which people are increasingly accessing software, computer power, and files over the Web instead of on their desktops.

The coinage of the term back a decade before

But Innovation Review tracked the coinage of the term back a decade before, to late 1996, and to an office park outside Houston, Texas. Then, Netscape's Web browser was the research to be excited about, the Yankees were playing Atlanta in the World Series, and the Taliban was celebrating the sacking of Kabul. Inside the offices of Compaq Computer, a small group of research executives was plotting the future of the Internet business and calling it "cloud computing."

Their vision was detailed and prescient. Not only would all business software move to the Web, nevertheless "'cloud computing'-enabled applications" like consumer file storage would become common. For two men in the room, a Compaq marketing executive named George Favaloro and a young technologist named Sean O'Sullivan, the cloud computing idea would have dramatically different outcomes. For Compaq, it was the start of a $2 billion-a-year business selling servers to Internet providers. For O'Sullivan's startup venture, it was a step towards disenchantment and insolvency.

Cloud computing is a neologism, an invented phrase, that after all doesn't appear in the Oxford English Dictionary. However its use is spreading rapidly because it captures a historic shift in the IT industry as more computer memory, processing power and apps are hosted in remote data centers, or the "cloud." With billions of dollars of IT spending in play, the term itself has become a disputed prize. In 2008, Dell drew outrage from programmers afterwards attempting to win a trademark on "cloud computing." Other research vendors, just as IBM and Oracle, have been accused of "cloud washing," or misusing the phrase to describe older product lines.

Like "Web 2.0," cloud computing has become a ubiquitous piece of jargon that many tech executives find annoying, nevertheless also hard to avoid. "I hated it, yet I taking everything into account gave in," says Carl Bass, president and CEO of Autodesk, whose company unveiled a cloud-computing marketing campaign in September. "I didn't think the term helped explain anything to people who didn't already know what it is."

The U.S. government has as well had trouble with the term. Afterwards the country's former IT czar, Vivek Kundra, pushed agencies to move to cheaper cloud services, procurement officials faced the question of what, specifically, counted as cloud computing. The government asked the National Institutes of Standards and Innovation to come up with a definition. Its final draft, released this month, begins by cautioning that "cloud computing can and does mean different things to different people."

The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet

"The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet. It's a rebranding of the Internet," says Reuven Cohen, cofounder of Cloud Camp, a course for programmers. "In other words why there is a raging debate. By virtue of being a metaphor, it's open to different interpretations." And, he adds, "it's worth money."

Part of the debate is who should get credit for inventing the idea. The notion of network-based computing dates to the 1960s, nevertheless many believe the first use of "cloud computing" in its modern context occurred on August 9, 2006, when at the time Google CEO Eric Schmidt introduced the term to an industry conference. "What's interesting [now] is that there is an emergent new model," Schmidt said, "I don't think people have actually understood how big this opportunity in fact is. It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing – they should be in a "cloud" somewhere."

The term began to see wider use the following year

The term began to see wider use the following year, afterwards companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM started to tout cloud-computing efforts as then. That was as well when it first appeared in newspaper articles, just as a The New York Times report from November 15, 2007 that carried the headline "I.B.M. to Push 'Cloud Computing,' Using Data From Afar." It described vague plans for "Internet-based supercomputing."

Sam Johnston, director of cloud and IT services at Equinix, says cloud computing took hold among techies because it described something important. "We now had a common handle for a number of trends that we had been observing, just as the consumerization and commoditization of IT," he wrote in an e-mail.

Johnston says it's never been clear who coined the term. As an editor of the Wikipedia entry for cloud computing, Johnston keeps a close eye on any attempts at misappropriation. He was first to raise alarms about Dell's trademark application and this summer he removed a citation from Wikipedia saying a professor at Emory had coined the phrase in the late 1990s. There have been "many attempts to co-opt the term, as so then as various claims of invention," says Johnston.

That may explain why cloud-watchers have as a rule disregarded or never learned of one unusually early usage—a May 1997 trademark application for "cloud computing" from a now-defunct company called NetCentric. The trademark application was for "educational services" just as "classes and seminars" and was never approved. However the use of the phrase was not coincidental. When Innovation Review tracked down NetCentric's founder, O'Sullivan, he agreed to help dig up paper copies of 15-year-old business plans from NetCentric and Compaq. The documents, written in late 1996, not only extensively use the phrase "cloud computing," yet also describe in accurate terms many of the ideas sweeping the Internet today.

The CEO of Salesforce

The CEO of Salesforce.com explains why traditional software is dead and how giants like Oracle are twisting the meaning of cloud computing.

Treating computing as a utility, like electricity, is an old idea. However now it makes financial sense—a historic shift in other words reshaping the IT industry.

The cell-phone business

Nokia helped invent the cell-phone business, however those days of innovation glory are long gone. Its new CTO has the job of creating the technologies and designs that will help the Finnish company regain its status as an technology leader.