A little while ago I finished reading “Behind The Cloud“, the story of Salesforce.com as told by Founder & CEO Marc Benioff.

I thought Marc and his co-author Carlye Adler did a great job of making the book easy to read by breaking out the book into 111 short stories called “plays”. Each “play” was a part of the Salesforce.com story with a lesson learned tied in. To see the true application of these lessons, while learning how Saleforce.com went from apartment startup to global publicly traded corporation was both fun and easy to understand.

One thing I think people take for granted about Salesforce and their story is that they were one of the very first cloud computing companies and one of the first to utilize the SaaS model for software. Essentially changing technology and the web as we know it today.

By taking a previously desktop based application in CRM and changing it to a wed-based application, Salesforce proved that cloud computing was not only a consumer fad but was going to become a huge industry in technology. Today, the current market for cloud based services is $46.4B and is on pace to reach $150.1B by 2013.  A lot of this credit goes to Marc and his vision as a first mover in this space.

Even if you don’t read the book, I would encourage you to read the last chapter, titled “The Final Play”. I linked it here. It will give you a little insight into how Marc thinks about business, philanthropy, and personal development.  Take a second to learn more about how he thinks.