Claiming Bloomberg and the Bloomberg Terminal  lock customers in with a proprietary workstation and software accessed on an archaic keyboard, and that Bloomberg offers a deep but very narrow selection of financial feeds, Salesforce.com will announce on Tuesday a competitive Wealth Management Edition  of its SaaS (Software as a Service) application for use by wealth management professionals.

Salesforce.com will also announce that Merrill Lynch  will deploy the Wealth Management Edition to its 25,000 financial advisors. In addition, the company is partnering with Cisco Systems  to deploy a VoIP phone with the wealth management solution for dialing customers within the context of the application. 

The major benefit to professionals using the Salesforce wealth management system is its integration capabilities of customer information with data services in real time, according to Kendall Collins , senior vice president, product marketing  at Salesforce.

Contextual relevance between market news and customers owning shares in a stock that is suddenly showing signs of movement would allow a manager to pull up a list of all clients who have a holding or interest in that stock and take an action, such as send an email, or execute a standing buy or sell order. 

According to Collins, Bloomberg is unable to match that capability.

"Bloomberg has moved slowly with the Internet," Collins said. But the question is whether or not Bloomberg is to Kodak as Salesforce is to digital photography?

Denis Pombriant , principal at Beagle Research , thinks so. Pombriant says a similar comparison could be made with any disruptive technology, minis and mainframes, PCs and minis.

"The problem for anyone being disrupted is they have a huge sunk cost in their existing products. However, it is a question of whether or not they want to do a creative destruction of their own product or have somebody else do it for them," Pombriant said.

The Wealth Management Edition will be delivered on the same upgrade and release schedule as other Salesforce products. The new application is still part of its multi-tenant architecture and is based at code level on one executable, Collins said. 

Salesforce hopes to leverage the fact that the financial services market is fairly fragmented. With over 3.8 million financial advisors, Bloomberg has the largest market share with only 240,000 Bloomberg workstations deployed.

The Salesforce wealth management system was co-designed with Merrill Lynch.

Pombriant called the announcement significant, pointing out that it is the first concrete demonstration that the SaaS platform is real and that the so-called long tail of SaaS is not just about smaller applications or applets.

"We are talking about a big sophisticated application that companies typically built in-house because they couldn’t find the expertise from vendors," Pombriant said.

Salesforce will continue to roll out additional solutions for the financial services industry, including a Banking Edition, Capital Markets, Insurance, and Mortgage editions, Collins said.

The Wealth Management Edition will be priced at $500 per user, per month and will be available in the third quarter.