Salesforce puts Bloomberg in its sights with Wealth Management Edition
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(InfoWorld) - Claiming Bloomberg and the Bloomberg TerminalÂ  lock customers in with a proprietary workstation and software accessed on an archaic keyboard, and that Bloomberg offers a deep but very narrow selection of financial feeds, Salesforce.com will announce on Tuesday a competitive Wealth Management EditionÂ  of its SaaS (Software as a Service) application for use by wealth management professionals. Salesforce.com will also announce that Merrill LynchÂ  will deploy the Wealth Management Edition to its 25,000 financial advisors. In addition, the company is partnering with Cisco SystemsÂ  to deploy a VoIP phone with the wealth management solution for dialing customers within the context of the application.Â  The major benefit to professionals using the Salesforce wealth management system is its integration capabilities of customer information with data services in real time, according to Kendall CollinsÂ , senior vice president, product marketingÂ  at Salesforce. Contextual relevance between market news and customers owning shares in a stock that is suddenly showing signs of movement would allow a manager to pull up a list of all clients who have a holding or interest in that stock and take an action, such as send an email, or execute a standing buy or sell order.Â  According to Collins, Bloomberg is unable to match that capability. "Bloomberg has moved slowly with the Internet," Collins said. But the question is whether or not Bloomberg is to Kodak as Salesforce is to digital photography? Denis PombriantÂ , principal at Beagle ResearchÂ , thinks so. Pombriant says a similar comparison could be made with any disruptive technology, minis and mainframes, PCs and minis. "The problem for anyone being disrupted is they have a huge sunk cost in their existing products. However, it is a question of whether or not they want to do a creative destruction of their own product or have somebody else do it for them," Pombriant said. The Wealth Management Edition will be delivered on the same upgrade and release schedule as other Salesforce products. The new application is still part of its multi-tenant architecture and is based at code level on one executable, Collins said.Â  Salesforce hopes to leverage the fact that the financial services market is fairly fragmented. With over 3.8 million financial advisors, Bloomberg has the largest market share with only 240,000 Bloomberg workstations deployed. The Salesforce wealth management system was co-designed with Merrill Lynch. Pombriant called the announcement significant, pointing out that it is the first concrete demonstration that the SaaS platform is real and that the so-called long tail of SaaS is not just about smaller applications or applets. "We are talking about a big sophisticated application that companies typically built in-house because they couldnât find the expertise from vendors," Pombriant said. Salesforce will continue to roll out additional solutions for the financial services industry, including a Banking Edition, Capital Markets, Insurance, and Mortgage editions, Collins said. The Wealth Management Edition will be priced at $500 per user, per month and will be available in the third quarter.
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Merrill Lynch & Co Inc.  may  look to sell its 20 percent stake in Bloomberg LP to raise  capital after writing down $8.4 billion of assets last quarter,  some investors have said.
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The visionary Vanguard founder shares his thoughts on the market.
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Investor's Business Daily - The best friend for mutual fund investors might very well be father time.
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Software maker promises that the sales force automation revamp will help sales processes by pulling in more data.
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Link to Salesforce.com data brings "software as a service" offering to back-office data integration tools.
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The Motley Fool - With the Google (Nasdaq: GOOG - News) IPO extravaganza, it seems that it is the only high-profile offering for 2004. Well, there was another one: Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM - News).
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Shares risk with partners Analysis Two companies are driving coverage of on demand business applications this year. Unfortunately for Salesforce.com, it isn't one of them.â¦
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InfoWorld - Everyone knows Salesforce.com as the company that pioneered SaaS (software as a service) and survived the dot-com bust when many other ASPs didn&#39;t. Now, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff says the company is ready to take on Microsoft&#160;as a leading development platform provider, a strategy he unveiled as &quot;Salesforce.com 2.0&quot; in New York on Tuesday.
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The most significant product advancement is Salesforce.com's newly released Telephony API tool kit, which allows its sales automation software to integrate with products from partners.
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Investor's Business Daily - Exchange traded funds finally are starting to get traction in the 401(k) plan market.
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Software developer Salesforce.com Inc. posted a sharp rise in second-quarter profit on better-than-expected revenue during its first quarter as a public company, but investors shunned the stock in late trading
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Here comes a chance to invest in some solid funds.
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By MICHAEL LIEDTKE  SAN FRANCISCO - Online software pioneer Salesforce.com Inc. will help Internet search leader Google Inc. sell ads as part of a partnership that falls short of Wall Street's anticipation since word of the alliance leaked last month.
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I admire PeopleSoft&#39;s (Nasdaq: PSFT) fight. Tuesday, the business software maker announced a broad partnership with IBM (NYSE: IBM) in which Big Blue&#39;s popular WebSphere middleware
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(InfoWorld) - Everyone knows Salesforce.com as the company that pioneered SaaS (software as a service) and survived the dot-com bust when many other ASPs didn't. Now, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff says the company is ready to take on MicrosoftÂ as a leading development platform provider, a strategy he unveiled as "Salesforce.com 2.0" in New York on Tuesday. Promoting its hosted application infrastructure as a platform for application development is not a new strategy for Salesforce.com, but the company seems to be turning up the volume on the message. At Tuesday's event, Benioff unveiledÂ a new hosted application called Wealth Management EditionÂ for the financial services industry and an increase in users from 5,000 to 25,000 at customer Merrill Lynch. But he also used the event to vigorously promote the company's transition from an ASP to a hosted application platform for partners. As the company approaches its eighth anniversary next month, Benioff said it's important that Salesforce.com think about achieving its first-decade goals over the next two years. Becoming a hosted platform for other ISVs -- many of whom don't have the financial resources to build applications on their own -- is at the top of the list, he said. "That's very much what we're doing today when we talk about Salesforce 2.0," he said. "Our vision started with our killer applications -- a whole new way to deliver enterprise software. Next we had very successful customers ... [then] it moved to the developer community to add on to that, and then it really got into a platform to give our customers and developers the ability to extend these products and create new products on the same infrastructure." Benioff described how Salesforce.com set up a collocation facility in San Mateo, California, for companies that need application infrastructure. There are 32 ISVs in the facility now with a waiting list for when the company expands the project, he said. This kind of facility, combined with the ability for ISVs to build applications on Salesforce.com's Apex platform for free will drive the company's success as a platform provider, Benioff said. ISVs will be able to post those applications on Salesforce.com's AppExchange directory and sell them on its AppStore. The transition from being a straight SaaS provider to having all these new offerings can be confusing, said Laura Lederman, an analyst with William Blair & Co. in Chicago. Pulling it all together as a cohesive platform under the Salesforce.com 2.0 moniker should spur wider understanding and adoption by customers, she said. Moving into the platform space will put Salesforce.com directly in the path of its favorite nemesis, Microsoft. Benioff, outspoken as usual, said Microsoft's model of still requiring customers to install their own software instead of hosting it on the Web is "really screwed up." He said he tried to update his computer to Windows Vista but was unsuccessful because it was too complicated. Benioff also insisted Salesforce.com has no desire to compete with its partners -- something for which Microsoft has been criticized -- even as it ventures into the vertical hosted applications space. "We want to foster competition on the AppExchange," he said. "If we build a [customer] recruiting application, we want other people to do that, too. We want the best [applications] to rise to the top."
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He's got a new fund, and he wants YOU to invest.