Salesforce.com is hoping to take a chunk of Bloomberg’s market share with a forthcoming version of its customer relationship management (CRM) service that targets financial brokers.
Called Salesforce Wealth Management Edition and due in the July-to-September period this year, the software builds in client and prospect profiles, workflow, approvals processes and other necessary functions on top of the core CRM features.
Salesforce said that by bringing financial and CRM data together, and by working on the service with partners Cisco, Dell and information providers Dow Jones and Thomson Financial, it can deliver value superior to current services.
“The profound effect is that there is a large vertical market of brokers that can leverage financial information and customer information together,” said Clarence So, Salesforce Europe’s chief marketing officer.
“We can offer a benefit over solutions like Bloomberg where you need another product to do your CRM and your [Bloomberg] data is proprietary.”
Bloomberg terminals are a fixture at many brokers but Salesforce will offer a £340 per-user per-month tariff and tout its credentials of openness. The company can also point to Merrill Lynch as a just-announced 25,000-seat win.
However, the Merrill deal will not see the investment bank kick out its Bloomberg terminals, and many feel that Salesforce’s role will be to supplement Bloomberg’s boxes rather than to replace them.
“There have been many attempts at Bloomberg-killers over the years, none of which has been successful,” wrote Steve Goldstein of business-information provider Alacra on his blog.
“Benioff might sell a lot of desktops at the $500 per-month price point, but it's unlikely any of those desktops will be acquired at Bloomberg's expense.”
Salesforce.com partner iDialogue said the Merrill deal was “a true inflexion point” but queried how support would operate.
“Will Salesforce create individual partitions to support customised SLAs?” wrote Mike Leach, founder of iDialogue, on his blog. “I'm comfortable with the occasional one- or two-hour downtime maintenance windows, but financial institutions are already accustomed to non-stop tickers and news feeds from Bloomberg and others.”
