New Delhi, June 3 -- Circa 1999. When Marc Benioff founded Salesforce, little did he realise that he was starting a movement, the Capex to Opex movement. One can call him a 'tech rebel' challenging the status quo in a world that only knew at that time IT could be delivered only on-premise. While the Application Service Provider (ASP) model had briefly gained some traction in the late 1990s as a way to deliver software over the internet, it was limited and fragmented. When Benioff and a bunch of other tech visionaries unfolded a hypothesis that IT could be delivered via the Internet at scale, many dismissed it as ambition, an utopia. Later, this vision came to be called Cloud and SaaS.

Clearly, when Benioff started Salesforce, he wasn't j...