TMCnet's executive editor Bob Liu is in New York City today covering Salesforce.com's CustomForce Day, where the on-demand CRM provider has announced its CustomForce 2.0 customization toolkit. Bob just filed a story from the event in which he revealed that Salesforce.com has announced Merrill Lynch as its newest and largest customer. Bob says this means as many as 5,000 new seats for Salesforce.com.
Here is Bob's story from this afternoon:
Salesforce.com Debuts CustomForce 2.0, Scores Merrill Lynch as Customer
This seems especially significant to me, as Salesforce.com has received some criticism lately by analysts who claim that its on-demand CRM solution is more suited to smaller enterprises and that larger companies could incur significant costs in trying to integrate Salesforce.com. In Bob's May 3 article, "Gartner: Beware of Salesforce.com," he says:
"Gartner said that within three years of an initial Salesforce.com deployment, more than 60 percent of larger organizations will find the cost double due to integration and customization compared with the total cost of ownership (TCO) for a prepackaged software solution."
Looks as if Merrill Lynch is about to discovery whether that's really true!
AB -- 5/24/05
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Salesforce.com tries to market itself as a hosted CRM solution for the big and the strong. The fact is, the average salesforce.com customer has 17 users using the system. According to the Small Business Administration in the US, a small business is any business with 1-499 employees and less than US $25 million in annual revenues.
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