As anytime, anywhere services increasingly populate clients around the globe, a future where software is delivered as a service is percolating business computing. One company, salesforce.com, is living-and-breathing proof that the future works.

Salesforce.com lets its customers manage customer and sales data via a subscription-based online customer relationship management (CRM) service. With it, sales and marketing organizations can conduct business dealings in real-time, globally, in 11 languages and all currencies.

Salesforce.com's business model is a shining example of a company leveraging technology as a strategic component of its business plan. Advances in connectivity and bandwidth technologies enabled salesforce.com to deliver its services; however, it was the creativity and ingenuity of salesforce.com's executive team that turned capability into market success.

This example puts an exclamation point on a rule contemporary businesses should live by: IT matters. IT is what gives a business scale. And in today's economy, where major industries and markets are participating in a networked economy on a global basis, scale has never been more vital.