Salesforce’s Marc Benioff tries to out-Oracle Larry Ellison

Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference was a smashing success this week, particularly if its aim was to make a bigger splash than Oracle OpenWorld — and tick off Larry Ellison in the process.

While Salesforce’s claim of 120,000 attendees sounds a tad high — a nice neat number exactly double the estimated attendance at OpenWorld in September — Diginomica saluted the show for featuring “apparently the largest inflatable structure [seen here] ever commissioned in North America,” a structure that Mad Money’s Jim Cramer likened to a football stadium.

In last year’s Dreamforce keynote, CEO Marc Benioff drove home the point that “business is social.” Fast-forward a year: Social is out and Benioff’s pitch, er, keynote was all about the “Internet of customers.”

The Internet is full of customers — who knew? — and Salesforce has just the platform to help companies reach out and grab ’em: Salesforce1, a single platform to rule them all. Salesforce1 “unifies many of the disparate pieces across [Salesforce.com’s] empire via a platform … meant to allow the rapid creation of apps that can work across Salesforce’s sales, service, and marketing apps, as well as on top of its Force.com, Heroku, and ExactTarget Fuel platforms, all at the same time,” writes InfoWorld’s Serdar Yegulalp. The company claims the platform has 10 times as many APIs as before and targets a broader set of application types.

In fact, the new mobile application in Salesforce1 is so powerful that Benioff claimed he is able to run the entire company using only his phone.

Another bit of hyperbole, perhaps? In a buzz-deflating bit of British journalism, The Register groused, “Benioff’s speeches, and those of his lieutenants, are punctuated by the lobotomized cheering of Salesforce’s acolytes, who are scattered through the keynote hall to give the impression of optimism where there are hangovers, and of enthusiasm where there are the Valium-stares of jaded execs and the cynical scowls of dyspeptic hacks.”

Still, Benioff drummed home the message that behind every device and app is a customer — not a cat scheming to rule the world — screaming to be recognized. “Remember who I am and the loyalty I deserve!” Benioff thundered in his keynote. (He was, I believe, playing the role of a customer, not demanding fealty from conference attendees.) “The difference is a deeper level of engagement between companies and organizations and the people they serve,” the IDG News Service writes. “Salesforce.com wants its technology to sit at the center of companies’ strategies as they build out these relationships.”

Or as The Register put it: “Salesforce’s essential role in life is to let companies connect up their various tentacles so that they can move as one towards the hapless consumer, and ensnare them.”

Dueling egos

At least Benioff showed up for Dreamforce, unlike Ellison who phoned in a last-minute cancelation to his company’s show. Yachting called, you know. Ellison was also a no-show at Dreamforce — “Larry is in Kyoto looking at the maple leaves … I’ll leave it there,” Benioff said — after accepting an invitation to appear. But that was back in June, when the two CEOs were carrying on a lovefest that saw Salesforce commit to using Oracle software to build its products for the long term.

Now Salesforce is cozying up to Hewlett-Packard — the same company that sued Oracle after it announced it would stop porting its software to the Itanium chip architecture used in high-end HP servers. At Dreamforce, Benioff announced that customers who want their own dedicated infrastructure within Salesforce.com’s cloud will now be able to get one, thanks to a new partnership with HP.

The Salesforce Superpod, based on HP’s Converged Infrastructure hardware, is a private area in Salesforce.com’s data center where Salesforce’s software will run on HP’s hardware. And HP will help Salesforce sell Superpods to other big customers uncomfortable with Salesforce’s multitenant delivery model.

Salesforce’s star is rising — the company claimed this week to have 1.4 million registered developers, almost double the number from a year ago — and Salesforce1 could help it grow even faster. Stay tuned to see if that rise upsets the tentative truce with Oracle and fuels further clashes between flamboyant CEOs striving to rule the cloud.

This story, “Salesforce’s Marc Benioff tries to out-Oracle Larry Ellison,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.