Ripples of the Wall Street Meltdown

Last week, there was enormous turmoil in the American financial system, triggering a Meltdown on Wall Street. For a lot of Tech Geeks, it's difficult to appreciate the impact of this Meltdown.

Consider Merril Lynch, which is now being acquired by Bank of America. Last year, Merril Lynch became one of Salesforce.com's largest customers. With 25,000 user licenses, they were larger than Cisco and Dell (with 15,000 users each). At the time, it was heralded as a mega-deal, and even prompted Salesforce.com to release a custom "wealth management edition", to go along with it's Salesforce Automation and CRM application suites.

Salesforce.com clearly has been making a push into the financial services industry, and now includes companies like Dow Jones Newswire and SunTrust Banks, but Bank of America is not a significant customer. I wonder what will happen to those 25,000 user licenses, now that Merril Lynch has been acquired by Bank of America. Some of that decision may hinge on how favorably Salesforce.com CFO Graham Smith's presentation to the Bank of America Investment Conference was received. You can hear his presentation here.

One thing is for sure, the Force Monkey Hotline has been ringing heavily the past two weeks. Three different head hunters called, looking for Project Managers and/or Developers with expertise in Salesforce.com. Their contracts were all in New York City, and all for companies in the Financial sector. One of them was already flying in a contractor from Denver Colorado every week.

The ripples of the Wall Street Meltdown have just begun, and I think we're going to be feeling them for a long time to come. As Wall Street consolidates, expect to see lots of infrastructure consolidation projects. These will be large, long-term projects, lasting several years. Project Managers will be in greater demand, especially for those experienced in system integration.

What about you? How has the upheavals on Wall Street affected your company? What impact do you predict from last week's events -- on the economy, in the IT sector, on your company, or on you?