Marc Benioff hinted about it during the earnings call highlighted here, he refered to it - "Next Tuesday in New York City, we will announce our largest deal ever; a major customer expanding to 25,000 subscribers, 19,000 which are net new subscribers in the fourth quarter."

Details of the deal are out, Salesforce.com has announced a deal that will see Merrill Lynch become its biggest user, adding 25,000 subscribers to its on-demand CRM service.

Marc said "Merrill Lynch's decision to embrace on-demand is a clear indicator that the largest, most complicated, most technologically sophisticated deployments are now moving to the new model."The US financial services giant seemed a likely candidate to be the 'mystery customer' alluded to last week, given the announcement was timed to coincide with the launch today of a vertical offering from Salesforce.com for the financial services sector called Salesforce Wealth Management Edition.

However, with its 25,000-customer Merrill Lynch deal, Salesforce.com is still someway behind the largest CRM implementation of on-premise rival Siebel, whose 2003 deal signed with IBM covers 60,000 users.

Source: 1

Prashanth Rai