A brief history of Salesforce.com
Summary
TwitterFacebookLinkedInGoogle PlusThe way the story goes is that Marc Benioff was floating in the sea just off Big Island in his beloved Hawaii during a sabbatical when he thought: why cant buying software be as a simple as Amazon is for consumer goods?This line of thinking eventually led to Benioff and a team of developers pioneering the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model by delivering its customer relationship management (CRM) software over the internet on a per seat, per month payment plan, instead of deployed on-premise servers under a hefty licensing agreement.Benioff went on to found Salesforce in March 1999, alongside three software developers from Left Coast Consulting: Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez.As outlined in Behind The Cloud, the idea was to "make software easier to purchase, simpler to use, and more democratic without the complexities of installation, maintenance and constant upgrades".Block has driven more vertical-specific solutions , made in-roads into lucrative enterprise customers and has helped push the company towards its long-term goal of a $10 billion run rate, which it hit in 2017.