This just in: Salesforce is taking over the world.

Okay, maybe that’s an overstatement. However, since I started at CRM magazine last month, Marc Benioff’s company has made some big moves and I’m impressed.

As our news editor Leonard Klie reported this morning, Salesforce announced that it has officially acquired Radian6, a top social media platform designed to help businesses track and engage in conversations over the Web. The acquisition came with a hefty price tag, $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock.

Even though I’m still a newcomer to the magazine and the industry as a whole, I can see that Salesforce is establishing itself as a major player. Just four days into the job, I attended Cloudforce 2011 in New York City, where Salesforce unveiled Service Cloud 3, a tool available for computers, smartphones, and tablet devices that allows organizations to communicate with customers while managing a higher volume on a variety of social platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Sure the 3,000 plus-member crowd, bass-pumping music, and flashing florescent lights were impressive, but it was also clear that Salesforce had plans for a few additional game changers like the one today.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have also completed a demo of the software with Scott Holden, senior director of product marketing at Salesforce, and wrote a story for an upcoming issue of CRM about a small tile company in California that credits the platform for much of its recent success. The energy, growth, and customer reviews prove that Salesforce is now a threat to much older companies like Microsoft and SAP. Sure, prospering organizations are exciting to follow and stockholders get a kick out of watching their investments soar. But as a journalist, I am a more interested in Benioff’s story.

After 13 years with Oracle and a stint at Apple, Benioff started Salesforce in 1999 out of a rental apartment in San Francisco. His mission? Put an end to clunky software CRM solutions. Five years later, Salesforce went public (under the stock symbol CRM) and it wasn’t long until the acquisitions began. Today, Benioff and his fortress have been recognized by Forrester and other notable organizations (including CRM magazine) for its excellence while racking in some major revenue along the way. Benioff also set up the Salesforce.com Foundation, a philanthropic arm of the company that contributes 1 percent of the company’s resources to supporting organizations that it deems as making the world a better place.

As a young, and perhaps idealistic, 20-something, Salesforce is truly a pleasure to write about.