- At around in 1961, John MacCharty suggested in a speech at MIT that computing can be sold like a utility, just like water or electricity. It was a brilliant idea, but like all brilliant ideas, it was ahead of its time, as for the next few decades, despite interest in the model, the technology simply was not ready for it. But of course time has passed and the technology caught that idea and after a few years, we mentioned that: Cloud Computing.
- In 1999, Salesforce.com started delivering applications to users using a simple website. The applications were delivered to enterprises over the Internet, and this way the dream of computing sold as utility were true.
- In 2002, Amazon started Amazon Web Services, providing services like storage (S3 – Simple Storage Service), computation and even human intelligence. However, only starting with the launch of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2: Virtual Server Machine) in 2006 a truly commercial service open to everybody existed.
- In 2009, Google Apps also started to provide cloud computing enterprise applications.
- Of course, all the big players are present in the cloud computing evolution, some were earlier, some were later. In 2009, Microsoft launched Windows Azure, and companies like Oracle and HP have all joined the game. This proves that today, cloud computing has become mainstream.