The evolutionary process from a technology concept to a service concept: A cloud computing case study

In Information Technology (IT), new concept words frequently appear and affect the business environment. In several cases, the core technologies and architectures remain the same despite slight concept changes. For example, both grid computing and software as a service (SaaS) are considered to be the forerunner of cloud computing. In this paper, we describe the manner in which we applied a text mining approach to analyze all articles of the 2002-2012 editions of a famous IT magazine; attributing to this analysis, we propose a new evolutionary model describing how technological concepts are transformed into services. We focus our analysis on cloud computing, and this analysis reveals that the technical concept of "grid computing" and other related concepts appeared together in the first phase. In the second phase, such a group of words integrate to form a new concept, SaaS, which later expands into PaaS and IaaS. Finally SaaS develops into "cloud computing", and gains recognition in each industry as a completely specialized service concept (i.e., "x-cloud"). In addition, our analysis reveals that concept evolution has been affected by another evolution, namely from the organization-oriented world to the individual-oriented world by the advancement of social networking in our societies. This phenomenon provides further interpretation on concept evolution.