Salesforce to Walk on Wall Street

Salesforce.com(CRM Quote), the cheeky software-on-demand pioneer, helped send Siebel Systems to that great recycling bin in the sky.

Now the company is going after Bloomberg, whose proprietary terminals clutter the desks of many Wall Street traders and financial advisers.

Salesforce is set to launch a service for investment advisers that will allow them to integrate real-time market and financial data with client information. The first big customer win is Merrill Lynch(MER Quote), which has signed up for a 25,000-seat subscription.

Salesforce's new wealth management edition was developed with the cooperation of Dell(DELL Quote) and Cisco Systems(CSCO Quote) on the hardware side, and Dow Jones(DJ Quote) and Thomson Financial on the content side. Coincidentally or not, both Dell and Cisco recently became 15,000-seat customers.

The new software runs $500 a seat per month, though it's likely that given the volume, Merrill paid significantly less.

Bloomberg has made a fortune supplying financial data via an expensive, proprietary computer system. The Salesforce system, says Salesforce Senior Vice President Kendall Collins, is open, meaning that it will work with a variety of hardware and content providers -- not just Dow and Thomson, both of which charge for their service. "The day of the proprietary box is coming to an end," he says.

Despite the feisty rhetoric, Salesforce is really targeting the desks of financial advisers, not traders. Still, that's a rich target -- there are an estimated 500,000 registered advisers and brokers in the U.S.

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