Oracle is keeping the acquisition train rolling with the purchase of Collective Intelligence, a social analytics firm that provides similar cloud-based services to Radian6, which Salesforce.com purchased last year. And if you think that’s a coincidence, I have a multi-tenant, highly scalable bridge to sell you.

The rivalry between Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison seem to be getting more intense. Last week, Salesforce announced the $800 million purchase of social media presence optimization service provider Buddy Media. But that came after Oracle’s $300 million buy of Virtue, which offers its own services in the same arena. In hindsight, it’s actually somewhat shocking that it took Oracle this long to match the Radian6 acquisition with one of its own.

Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that it’s only the new-model Larry Ellison who loves the cloud. In a release, Oracle promises that Collective Intelligence will be rolled tightly into the company’s existing software-as-a-service (SaaS) product offerings – including the aforementioned Virtue – to create “most advanced and comprehensive social relationship platform.”

As for Collective Intelligence itself, Oracle promises all the usual hoopla around social media, including more targeted marketing campaigns, enhanced customer engagement, and generally improving marketing performance without huge budget increases. Notably, Oracle’s still not using the term “social enterprise,” a phrase popularized by Salesforce’s Benioff and adopted by others in the industry, notably HP.

Something Oracle has always had over Salesforce.com, though, is simple breadth and depth of offering and experience. With Oracle expected to launch platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at an event tomorrow, it’s certainly possible that it’s going to be taking on Salesforce.com’s Heroku and Force.com, too.

But Oracle is probably going to be willing to (or even encourage) deploy in a customer’s data center rather than assume ownership of and responsibility for the service directly. It’s a view that’s incompatible with Salesforce’s “No Software” philosophy. And one way or the other, that schism is likely to make all the difference in the market