SAN FRANCISCO -- Salesforce.com is putting more of its money where its mouth is, preparing to more than double its datacenter footprint as it competes with enterprise software giants like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft.

But it was that mouth that stole the show yesterday at Dreamforce 2008, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor's annual user conference.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce's (NYSE: CRM) chairman and CEO, took the opportunity during a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with press and analysts to further explain the thinking behind several company announcements from earlier in the day. He also didn't shy away from blasting Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and SAP (NYSE: SAP) as having, in his mind, only one, inflexible solution.

"When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," he said.

Despite the rhetoric, Benioff said Salesforce.com is willing to work with anybody. "We love everybody," he quipped.

Still, Benioff can't deny that Salesforce is facing ever-growing competition from its deep-pocketed, entrenched rivals in the enterprise software space. Microsoft last week unveiled Azure, the Redmond software giant's foray into cloud computing, which it announced during its Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles.

Additionally, Oracle is pushing into cloud-based computing, while SAP's on-demand enterprise solution, Business ByDesign, made its debut last year.

In particular, Benioff singled out SAP's Business ByDesign for derision. The company's CEO, Henning Kagermann, described Business ByDesign's launch as the most important announcement he made in his career. But almost immediately, the effort came under heavy criticism. SAP has since made a number of changes in Business ByDesign.

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Benioff remains unimpressed.

"It's a huge implosion," he said. "The way they're doing it is insane."

Strategic moves

Benioff's comments followed his keynote speech earlier in the day, during which he outlined new products in the cloud and deals with Facebook and Amazon. Those efforts aim to give Salesforce greater prominence as enterprises and smaller businesses move more applications and services to the cloud.

In addition to those deals, Benioff said Salesforce would be building its third datacenter, to be located in Singapore. He added that it's being developed in partnership with a major customer, Citibank, which is funding the project.

Salesforce.com is also weighing two additional datacenters, to be located in Japan and Europe. However, he would not disclose any more details.

In addition to Citibank shouldering some of the burden for expanding its datacenters, Salesforce expect its new additions will be relatively inexpensive because of the way its software architecture is designed.

For one reason, Benioff said the company's infrastructure was written from the ground up to support multitenancy -- in which one instance of an application serves multiple customers. As a result, it needs fewer servers.

"We have an average of 500 computers in a datacenter, instead of 5,000 or 50,000," he said.

Benioff also elaborated on Salesforce.com's plan to woo independent software vendors. This includes supporting their sales efforts by providing them free checkout services until 2010, which will encourage them to write more applications, Benioff said.

Those additional applications will make Salesforce.com more attractive to customers, Benioff said. Customers have created more than 85,000 custom applications on the company's Force.com platform so far, he said.

Benioff faced questions on why Salesforce.com had opted to team up with the predominantly consumer-oriented social networking site Facebook, in a deal that will enable enterprises to build social networking features into Salesforce apps.

Benioff said Salesforce had chosen Facebook over LinkedIn, which is designed for professionals, since it offered the greatest scale. Facebook counts a user base of 110 million.

He added, however, that the Facebook effort as well as a similar deal with Amazon.com -- linking Force.com files natively with Amazon's hosted storage and cloud computing platform -- were strategic moves, without a clear-cut revenue model.

Instead, they were poised to help defend Salesforce against efforts like Microsoft's Azure.

"It's about stickiness, about lower attrition," Benioff explained. "This is strategic and it's really important. If we're going to have to fight it out with Azure, and they work with MSN, we can work with all these others."

Benioff had mixed emotions when it came to the threat from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). On one hand, he said products from the Azure announcement are at least two years away. But he said Microsoft's customer relationship management offering would prove a big threat -- because of Microsoft's size.

"They use their monopoly to keep everybody in the box," he said.

Still, he said, its impact will be limited because it works only with other Microsoft products.

"Microsoft CRM doesn't work with the iPhone, or BlackBerry or Google," Benioff said. "They hate everybody and we love everybody. This is a part of our core strategy -- love."