Businessweek and ZDNet’s Larry Dignan report that Merrill Lynch is the latest mystery customer that is signing up for 25,000 subscriptions. The price for subscription is $500 per user per month. Now, if Merrill Lynch actually were to pay this price, they would be down $150 Million a year. That would be more than 25% of Salesforce.com’s annual revenue.
The reality is perhaps the 25,000 subscriptions are at a very heavy discount (90%+), or only a subset of the 25,000 subscriptions are for the “Financial Adviser” edition and the rest are vanilla Salesforce.
On vanilla, here is a question: Is vanilla same as plain? Isn’t vanilla a flavor? As in Plain Yogurt vs Vanilla Yogurt? When did Vanilla loose its status as a differentiator?
What do you think? About vanilla? Or Salesforce?