History?

In researching what to write next, I stumbled across an article on CloudTweaks about history that I thought had some pertinent things to say. I really liked the quote by Churchill:"History is written by the victors."

While watching the history of cloud computing, I have seen it evolve from one idea to many,depending on which space you paid attention to at the time. While the history can be traced much further back as mentioned in the CloudTweaks article, the history that I and many of you followed started with Salesforce.com.

In 2000, I remember working at a startup and receiving calls and emails from the folks at Salesforce about how we could do Customer Relationship Management (CRM) from their facilities over the internet. Today, we hardly flinch at such a proposal, but at that early stage it was interesting convincing management that not only could it be done, but that it worked. Since that early stage a number of different ideas developed on how to use the cloud. Consequently, when we talk about cloud computing, different people have different perspectives based on the flavor (service model) to which they have been exposed. Here is the first of the major flavors:

Software as a Service (SaaS) A good example of this was Salesforce when they started out. Another SaaS provider that you may have been exposed to is Google Apps. Many companies explored, thrived, or died based on this model. I remember having some friends developing software that would automatically discover and set up Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) on remote computers. The question to me from the CEO at the time was what I thought would be better for a company I knew about, software on the customer's equipment or SaaS. Back then, what a question! We were just being exposed to this idea and there were so many variables that hadn't been addressed. Now, the answer would come easily. SaaS, mostly used for business,can be thought of, in it's simplest form, as on-demand software. CRM is still the largest market, but add to that Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), accounting,Human Resources Management (HRM), Content Management (CM), and collaboration and according to the Gartner Group you have an estimated $12.7B in sales by the end of 2011.

Two of the other flavors to discuss are Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which we will explore next. For some of us, this is some plodding history, but as promised, there will be something here for anyone interested in cloud computing. Hang with me through the basics while we catch up those not exposed to cloud computing, but have an interest.

Once we all get caught up, hold onto your seats as the things happening right now in cloud computing are daily giving us new options in all areas. Stay Tuned as the innovation going on will blow you away!