John Willis

John Willis's Blog Much like “Web 2.0″, cloud computing was a collection of related concepts that people recognized, but didn’t really have a good descriptor for, a definition in search of a term, you could say. When Google CEO Eric Schmidt  used it in 2006 to describe their own stuff and then Amazon included the word “cloud” in EC2 when it was launched a few weeks later (August 24), the term became mainstream. Chris Sears, one of Atlanta’s finer cloud enthusiasts has earned some battle scars on the forums discussing the topic of “Cloud Computing”.   I remember him once telling me that he had done some research on the original sighting of the phrase “Cloud Computing”.  So this afternoon when I posted a tweet asking Who Coined The Phrase Cloud Computing? he sent the following response: "As for the origin of the term “cloud computing”, there are a few possibilities…... (more)

The Cloud Wars - Is Guitar Hero a Cloud?

John Willis's Blog I was reading a recent post about the Merrill Lynch’s research note titled “The Cloud Wars: $100+ billion at stake” and it started me thinking about the cloud vs. IT infrastructure question again. As the cloud-o-sphere tries to define this “cloud” thing, myself included, it seems like the list of who is a cloud just keeps getting longer and longer. I originally thought the Forrester 11 list was a little to long when it included SalesForce.com and Akamai as cloud providers. The general consensus seems to be, if you are a SaaS, PaaS, or a IaaS you are probably a ... (more)