In 1999 Marc Benioff had an idea, an amazing money making idea: he was going to sell software designed for customer relation management. To do so, Benioff created the first cloud computing company of the United States of America. This company was named Salesforce.com and it is currently valued at more than 45 billion dollars. This means that Salesforce.com is the number one cloud computing company in the world, and remains among the top ten companies of the United States of America. Per se, this alone, is amazing.

But the way Benioff developed his business is even more amazing, that the raw success he collected. Benioff is, per definition, the example of the new internet era moguls. He graduated as a regular student, and academically speaking, he had nothing to show off. But Benioff developed his first application when he was still in high school, and managed to sell it for a 75 dollar profit. When he was 15, Benioff founded Liberty Software, creating and selling games for the Atari 8-bit computer among others and by 16 the young programmer was earning royalties of $1,500 a month, more than enough to pay for college.

Mark Benioff is a self-made man of the world of technology.

And his radical approach towards customer relation management lead Fortune Magazine to name him, in 2010, one of the Smartest 50 People in Technology Development Worldwide, as well as one of the Top 50 People in Business. Furthermore, he was appointed by President George W. Bush as the co-chairman of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee and served from 2003–2005, overseeing the publishing of critical reports on health care information technology, cybersecurity, and computational sciences.

Also the San Francisco Business Times named him 2009 Executive of the Year “for defying the fierce economic downdraft–and taking the lead role in the creation of an industry.” This industry is the cloud based computing services provided by Salesforce.com, a network that currently offers more than 20 different software solutions to manage sales, customers, customer’s feedback, inventory and even to control and escalate corporate decision-making.

For creating the most efficient customer relation management system to date, and doing so in a Cloud Computing environment, Mark Benioff has made history. And his name will be forever associated with the world of Quality Culture and Total Quality Management.