It's ok for a company to ask these things, but is this company a professional SEO company? Do they know what they are talking about when asking to build so many backlinks? Do you have a time limit? Can the company website handle the amount of links without raising unatural linking alarms for Google? Are they all targeting the home page only or inner pages too? What anchor text are you using, i.e. what keyword research have they/you done?
All these questions and more need to be answered IMO before you build links. There needs to be a plan of action to follow.
Basicly what does the company want to achieve from all these links? So you have 2 options IMO:
1) Blast loads of links using the above mentioned software (scrapebox etc) and blindly do what the company asked for
OR
2) Speak to them and ask the important questions to find out their goals and come up with a plan of action and do a proper job.
Your choice.