The announcement that Merrill Lynch is moving to 25,000 seats on Salesforce.com stirs a few thoughts in my mind.

First, replacing Bloomberg with a web based Financial Services information aggregator just makes sense. Someone should update the Wikipedia entry for SOA to read "See Merrills use of Salesforce for Wealth Management". This isn't hype. It is a true inflection point.

Second, my internal business compass is wary of having any customer represent more than 10% of total annual revenue. I'm sure Merrill is getting some serious volume discounts to help Salesforce co-develop this solution; but at $500 bucks a seat, 25,000 seats would represent a significant percentage of SForce total revenue.

Third, with customer announcements of this size, will Salesforce continue to deploy them within an existing data partition, such as NA1, NA2, NA3, EMEA, etc? Will Salesforce create individual partitions, such as ML.Salesforce.com, to support customized SLAs? I'm comfortable with the occasional 1-2 hour downtime maintenance windows, but Financial Institutions are already accustomed to non-stop tickers and news feeds from Bloomberg and others.