Citigroup and Salesforce.com are both big companies, and a new deal between them isn’t insignificant, either – Citigroup chose Salesforce to provide software to 30,000 financial advisors.
“We believe this is the largest and most important CRM agreement of 2007, and our largest deal ever,” stated Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO and chairman. Now, the first part of his sentence may be debatable, but he’s unlikely to get stats about his own company wrong.
Benioff also noted, “After a lengthy evaluation process to assess functionality, availability, security and integration capabilities, Citibank has selected Salesforce.com over every other CRM solution, including Oracle, Microsoft and SAP,” and that’s not a bad group of corporations to beat.
This deal might, then, seem related to a jump of 74 percent in Salesforce’s profits, but the timing is such that resulting revenue probably won’t go on the books until the fourth quarter. Salesforce did well in the third quarter due to whatever other business it had going on.
That’ll make it all the more interesting to see what happens over the next few months – since Citigroup signed its deal with Salesforce, a lot of other companies may want to do the same thing.
