OSullivan thinks it could have been his ideaafter all, why else would he later try to trademark it? He was also a constant presence at Compaqs Texas headquarters at the time. OSullivan located a daily planner, dated October 29, 1996, in which he had jotted down the phrase Cloud Computing: The Cloud has no Borders following a meeting with Favaloro that day. That handwritten note and the Compaq business plan, separated by two weeks, are the earliest documented references to the phrase cloud computing that Technology Review was able to locate.

There are only two people who could have come up with the term: me, at NetCentric, or George Favaloro, at Compaq or both of us together, brainstorming, says OSullivan.

Both agree that cloud computing was born as a marketing term. At the time, telecom networks were already referred to as the cloud; in engineering drawings, a cloud represented the network. What they were hunting for was a slogan to link the fast-developing Internet opportunity to businesses Compaq knew about. Computing was bedrock for Compaq, but now this messy cloud was happening, says Favaloro. And we needed a handle to bring those things together.

Their new marketing term didnt catch fire, howeverand its possible others independently coined the term at a later date. Consider the draft version of a January 1997 Compaq press release, announcing its investment in NetCentric, which described the deal as part of a strategic initiative to provide Cloud Computing to businesses. That phrase was destined to be ages ahead of its time, had not Compaqs internal PR team objected and changed it to Internet computing in the final version of the release.

In fact, Compaq eventually dropped the term entirely, along with its plans for Internet software. That didnt matter to Favaloro. Hed managed to point Compaq (which later merged with HP) toward what became a huge business selling servers to early Internet providers and Web-page hosters, like UUNet. Its ridiculous now, but the big realization we had was that there was going to be an explosion of people using servers not on their premises, says Favaloro. I went from being a heretic inside Compaq to being treated like a prophet.

For NetCentric, the cloud-computing concept ended in disappointment. OSullivan gave up using the term as he struggled to market an Internet fax serviceone app the spotty network cloud of the day could handle. Eventually, the company went belly up and closed its doors. We got drawn down a rathole, and we didnt end up launching a raft of cloud computing apps thats something that sticks with me, says OSullivan, who later took a sabbatical from the tech world to attend film school and start a nonprofit to help with the reconstruction of Iraq.

Favaloro now heads an environmental consulting firm in Waltham, Massachussetts. What is remarkable, he says, is that the cloud he and OSullivan imagined 15 years ago has become a reality. I now run a 15-person company and, in terms of making us productive, our systems are far better than those of any of big company. We bring up and roll out new apps in a matter of hours. If we like them, we keep them, if not, we abandon them. We self-administer, everything meshes, we have access everywhere, its safe, its got great uptime, its all backed up, and our costs are tiny, says Favaloro. The vision came true.

Excerpt from:

Who Coined 'Cloud Computing'? | MIT Technology Review