Today TechCrunch reported that Seesmic will announce a new product tomorrow at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event: Seesmic CRM, a Salesforce.com client for Android devices, the iPad and eventually Windows Phone 7. Salesforce.com only offers official native apps for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile. Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur told TechCrunch he doesn’t see the Seesmic apps as competing with Salesforce.com.

Seesmic already offers beta support for Salesforce.com Chatter in its Seesmic Desktop and Seesmic Mobile products, but this is the first straight-up enterprise oriented offering from Seesmic. TechCrunch points to the fact that Twitter has discouraged developers from building new Twitter clients as a reason for Seesmic to depart from its traditional practice of building clients for consumer social networking tools. That and an actual business model (according to TechCrunch Seesmic may charge $10 per month per user for Seesmic CRM) could be reasons for the move.

Salesforce.com is an investor in Seesmic, it just participated in Seesmic’s round-C funding in February. There’s speculation that Salesforce.com will acquire Seesmic.

What Else Can We Expect to See at Dreamforce?

The theme of this year’s Dreamforce is “Welcome to the Social Enterprise.” Although Salesforce.com has been billing itself as “the cloud computing company” for the past few years, CEO Marc Benioff made headlines earlier this year when he declared the cloud “passe” and said the company was moving on to “the social enterprise.” It’s tempting to get distracted by Benioff’s hyperbole, or to argue that enterprise social collaboration tools aren’t exactly new (Socialtext was founded way back in 2003, and you could probably think of older groupware like Lotus Notes as “social”), but I’d rather focus on what vendors need to do to make enterprise social media tools more viable.

To that end, I’m hoping to see some serious Chatter integrations beyond Salesforce.com’s own products like its CRM software-as-a-service. I’d rather see Chatter getting deep integration with the rest of the enterprise, which is what its rivals like Yammer and Cisco Quad have been working towards lately. Regular readers are probably going to get tired of hearing this from me, so I’ll leave it at that for internal integrations. But what about integration with customer facing tools?

Salesforce.com announced new features for its customer service product earlier this year, and acquired social media monitoring and analytics company Radian6. It would be interesting to see Chatter being used to tie disparate pieces of the enterprise together, such as customer service, social media engagement, customer acquisition, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some announcements to this end.

Krishnan Subramanian thinks Salesforce.com will also announce new features for Chatter based on technology it acquired from DimDim, which could make Chatter into a unified communications and Web conferencing tool as well as a microblogging/social networking tool. Along those lines, I’m hoping we hear more about ManyMoon, the project management and collaboration company Salesforce.com acquired earlier this year. Perhaps we’ll see some project management tools come to Chatter?

Platforms

On a less social note, we already saw the announcement that Heroku, which Salesforce.com acquired last year, is adding support for Java, and we may see some more platform-as-a-service related news come out of the event as well. Salesforce.com also announced Database.com last year, and since VMware introduced a competitor today VMworld, it would be interesting to see more from that project as well. The battle for developers will be an important one.

Burn Notice

I hope Benioff spends some time addressing concerns about the company’s spending. It’s hard not to notice how much money Salesforce.com has been burning through. It paid for commercials featuring the Black Eyed Peas during Super Bowl to promote Chatter. It’s also paying to build new office space in San Francisco instead of renting existing space in the city or suburbs. It paid at least $1.5 million for the domain name data.com, and and has been on something of an acquisition streak. Metallica is playing at Dreamforce, and I don’t imagine they come cheap. Last year’s event featured Stevie Wonder. Will.I.Am from the Black Eyed Peas performed last year and is scheduled to appear at the event again this year. The list goes on.

On the one hand, Salesforce.com is cash flush and it’s searching for new opportunities in new markets through acquisitions. On the other, it’s spending huge amounts of money on companies that may or may not fit well with Salesforce.com’s overall strategy – not to mention the other expenses. It’s easy to imagine Salesforce.com having its Nokia/Cisco/HP “re-focusing moment” in which it has to dump some of these various projects and acquisitions its taken on and get back to CRM.

Services Angle

Salesforce.com is widely seen as having validated the enterprise software-as-a-service marketing, and what does is closely watched by the industry. The company has spent the past two years positioning itself within many of leading technology trends of the day: social collaboration, platform-as-a-service, enterprise mobility and social media analytics. That’s why people are eager to see what announcements come out of Dreamforce. Will it justify Salesforce.com’s spending? Highlight new trends? Or reveal an emperor with no clothes?

Although the event is highlighting social, keep an eye on what happens with PaaS and Salesforce.com’s platform strategy in general. This area continues to heat-up. VMware has Cloud Foundry and vFabric Data Director. Red Hat has OpenShift. Microsoft has Azure. Salesforce.com has Heroku and Database.com. It’s all about winning over developers, as the companies that that win the platform battle will be defining the architecture of the next generation of applications.