From his apartment in 1999, Marc Benioff started a new-fangled software company, Salesforce.com (CRM). While there have been some missteps along the way, the company is a model of success. Today, Salesforce.com generates more than $1 billion in sales, is profitable and has a market cap of $9 billion.

How did Marc do it? Well, now we have a chance to find out. That is, he has written an excellent book about his experiences and strategies, called Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company -- and Revolutionized an Industry.

One of the best ways for your business to get exposure and credibility is through public relations. Yet, hiring a PR firm can be expensive, easily running $5,000 to $10,000 per month.

Despite this, it's possible to do PR on your own. Keep in mind that a key to success is having an active and passionate founder or CEO who makes media relations a priority. This has been the case with many great leaders, such as Howard Schultz at Starbucks (NYSE: SBUX) and Marc Benioff at Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM).

So, let's take a look at some of the steps you can take to improve your PR.

Founded in 1999, Intacct is now a key player in the on-demand software space. The focus is on enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small and mid-size companies (of which there are about 2,000 customers).

To ramp up growth, the company raised $14 million in venture capital. The investors include Sigma Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Emergence Capital Partners.

I had a chance to interview the company's CEO, Mike Braun. He is a veteran of the tech world, having worked at high level positions for IBM (NYSE: IBM) as well as a variety of upstart companies.

Q: Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) just reported a record quarter. What's your perspective on the company's future growth prospects?

A: It was a fantastic quarter -- further demonstrating the momentum of the new "on-demand" computing model. Salesforce continues to focus on new customer acquisition, which drives high expenses in the near term, but you can get a preview on the future by looking at the cash flow growth of 197% YTY. Once companies move to this delivery model, whether with salesforce.com or Intacct, they love it and will stay for life.

This the fourth company in my on-going series of the Top 25 stocks for the NEXT 25 years. The criteria to make the list are a company's ability to address a huge market, lead the way in re-defining a paradigm shift and of course, be superbly led and managed. salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE: CRM) fits the bill. This will be the largest name on my list in term of market capitalization -- $5 billion. Why put a stock that has already achieved a $5 billion market cap on the list in the first place? Because CRM has the chance to become a mega-growth company over these next 25 years. One could argue, as I have heard before, that CRM could one day attain a $200+ billion market cap. I agree. Let's get into the reasons.

In the 1980s and 1990s, millions of businesses and government entities purchased multi-million dollar software systems to modernize their operations and be able to communicate in-house as well as through the entire supply chain. Billions upon billions of dollars were spent until the software industry almost come to a grinding halt in the early 2000s. Companies took a step back and asked the questions such as: We own it, now what? How do these systems integrate with other systems and how do we justify our huge investments on an ROI (return on investment) basis? Many found that they over-invested as they bought too much horse power and were stuck with expensive maintenance contracts. Enter salesforce.com.

Last evening, Jim Cramer had a brief conversation with Marc Benioff, the Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com (NASDAQ: CRM). Cramer has been a skeptic of Salesforce.com's success and sustainability in the marketplace. He's dead wrong.

Cramer doesn't get the company's business model or understand its success.

Benioff was with Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL) early in his career and learned the ropes there. He found that customers were frustrated because it took millions of dollars and 12 to 18 months to install new software and to train employees how to use it. Organizations were impatient with huge purchases taking too long to yield returns and improved functionality.

Salesforce.com is different. Its lead product is a CRM program, which stands for customer relationship manager. CRM, also Salesforce.com's ticker, allows for companies to track customer progress, customer happiness and customer status. The Salesforce.com programs are sold on a user-by-user basis, install very easily and are hosted at Salesforce.com's data center. There is no tying up of customers' databases. All is secured and backed up.

Benioff, in other words, understood the customer's needs and wishes. There are now several other business applications that Salesforce.com sells to its customers.

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) was founded by a former Oracle executive who believed that some business software services could be best served over the web. He hoped to profit by creating an alternative to the "installed software" model that most software companies still operate on today. From a revenue standpoint, Salesforce.com is not nearly as large as the big software players. In terms of having a vision for a future business model, though, I like it.

This "software as a service" company now wants to expand beyond offering just certain business services over the web as "hosted services." It is now entering the web services management arena by purchasing Koral, which created a Web content management service tied to Salesforce.com. Hey, there is no better buy than some company that already has the same vision and product mentality you have, right? What Salesforce.com wants to do is make it easy to manage so-called unstructured data -- things such as Microsoft Office documents and multimedia files.

If this sounds a bit like Google's approach to things, that's because it is. There is quite a bit of similarity between the web-based visions of Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Salesforce.com. This may end up making the companies major competitors in future years, sort of like the big software companies that competed in the early and mid 1990s. If Salesforce.com uses its brains for web content management, you can bet it'll be setting itself up for a battle with Google's Apps.

Salesforce.com has agreed to purchase Kieden, a company that makes software to purchase and manage Google AdWords for customers. This will give Salesforce.com the capability to offer Google AdWords campaigns alongside its web-based salesforce and marketing management service. The service allows marketing and advertising managers to analyze ongoing campaigns by viewing which people who clicked on Google AdWords keywords became sales leads.

This gives a completed sales-lead closed-end loop to track sales that result in actual revenue but which originate from Google AdWords. The Kieden software presents a dashboard of information that displays the Google AdWords that were clicked on, along with whether those clicks led to shopping sessions as well as an actual sale.

Salesforce.com, according to CEO Marc Benioff, is trying to bridge the gap between customer relationship management (CRM) and Google's AdWords program. There is a disconnect now, since leads are provided but the proverbial travel path a customer takes from first viewing an ad to completing a purchase is still a shaky trail. The more you understand your customer's behavior and online "travel pattern," the more you can acclimate to the needs of that customer and produce more actual sales, right? This is a good thing for Salesforce.com -- the acquisition makes sense and fits into the company's vision.

Brian White has worked in various executive positions in technology and telecommunications and now focuses on editing and writing.

What have you done for me lately? Those words have been screamed with sincerity from the lips of Janet Jackson for over a decade, and some Microsoft investors have started screaming the same sentiment about the perceived-laggard Microsoft. While still a huge force to be reckoned with, Microsoft is perceived by many as a slow, bloated company that has an entrenched (read: safe) marketshare and is slowly competing against more nimble competitors in just about every space, including Internet search (Google), digital music players (Apple) and web services (salesforce.com).

Let's look at Microsoft against Salesforce.com. Marc Benioff, an Oracle alum that spun away from the Larry Ellison control freak atmosphere at Oracle to found Salesforce.com over six years ago, has shaped his company in a wild and successful way. Delivering services over the web means no updates, patches or upgrades to purchase and install by IT departments -- which is a huge benefit that generally gets the gloss-over from the media.