The Leader in Cloud Computing Technology: Salesforce.com

Cloud computing technology has changed the way people and companies work in the last few years. With this innovation, resources like software and information can be provided and shared as a utility over a network. Cloud computing has improved accessibility to information and various operating or management systems in more ways than one. 

Behind the development of cloud computing technology is one company called Salesforce.com. This cloud computing company is responsible for spearheading the shift to the Social Enterprise. With their trusted cloud platform and apps, Salesforce.com has helped employees collaborate and connect with customers better than they have ever been before. 

Salesforce.com was founded in 1999 in a small San Francisco apartment, which marked the beginning of “The End of Software” revolution. In just one year, the company was able to acquire 1,500 customers and thirty thousand subscribers. It also launched its first online sales force automation solution during this period. From then on, the rise of this innovative company has been unstoppable.

Throughout the years, Salesforce.com garnered numerous awards for their revolutionary service. In its early years, the company was cited as the “Fastest Growing Online CRM Company” by Morgan Stanley. It was also the recipient of PC Magazine’s Editors’ Choice Award and Computing Magazine’s Enterprise Product of the Year. 

From a small start-up in the late 1990s, Salesforce.com now has over 93,000 customers. They now have eleven services all in all, including Sales Cloud, Remedyforce, and AppExchange. The company is also abuzz over a social-networking-software, Chatter, made especially for the workplace. 

Salesforce.com’s mission to make workplace processes and operations simpler led to the creation of some of the most innovative solutions for various industries.  With its successes in a relatively new industry, Salesforce.com is expected to become an indispensable arm of small- to large-scale companies in the near future.

Five Dollars and a Dream

Photo by Mr. T in DC

The entrepreneurs behind the Ben & Jerry's ice cream brand got their start back in 1977when a correspondence course in ice cream making cost just five dollars. Friends Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield took this class then with a $12,000 investment, launched their first "scoop shop" in Burlington, Vt. Cohen and Greenfield gave away free scoops of ice cream to everyone who came in to mark their first anniversary in 1979, a tradition the company continues until today.

After high school, Cohen attended several colleges throughout the Northeast but didn't graduate from any of them. Greenfield, on the other hand, attended Oberlin College and received an undergraduate degree. Upon graduation, he moved into a Manhattan apartment with Cohen and worked in a lab while submitting his applications for medical school. His attempts at getting into medical school were unsuccessful so he and Cohen decided to start a company together in the food industry.

Within a few years, Ben & Jerry's had a packing plant to pack and deliver pints to local grocers and restaurants as well as several franchises. By the time the company celebrated its 10th-year anniversary, sales were over $32 million. Many people credit the company's success to innovative flavors and catchy names such as New York Super Fudge Chunk and Cherry Garcia. Ben & Jerry's pride themselves in using milk from cows not treated with growth hormones and use eco-friendly practices including recycled packaging, wherever possible. Cohen and Greenfield were named the U.S. Small Business Persons of the Year in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan.