10 Cloud Computing Pioneers

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

It’s hard to write history when you’re still in the thick of recording it. However, in cloud computing we’ve amassed just enough background to name some of the early pioneers who’ve helped establish the relatively new computing paradigm.

The list is neither exhaustive nor all inclusive. And, undoubtedly, there will be other lists, highlighting other quiet innovators whose names we’re just beginning to hear, and whose accomplishments will be well-known in the coming years. But for IT managers in the midst of considering or adopting cloud computing, this list offers a commentary on where we have so recently come from, and where we may be going in the near future…

This list necessarily ignores how even these pioneers are standing on the shoulders of giants themselves. Consider, for example, the key work accomplished on distributed systems at Sun Microsystems and the early cluster builders, who preceded Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Rackspace on the cloud front. Still, cloud development has moved at an accelerated pace compared to how long it took personal computing or client-server computing to emerge. Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service (S3) service launched just six years ago, followed by Enterprise Compute Cloud (EC2). Google AppEngine launched in 2008. Microsoft’s beta version of Azure cloud services came in 2009…

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