With Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference set to kick off later this month, the spotlight once again falls on its ongoing love/hate relationship with Oracle, and what each company is doing to wrongfoot the other.

Dreamforce will take place from November 18-21, with more than 120,000 attendees set to turn up for the annual event, making it Salesforce’s biggest conference to date. The size of the show reflects the massive growth of Salesforce.com, which has become one of the undisputed kings of cloud software. This year’s event is expected to focus on Salesforce’s strategy in marketing software, which CEO Marc Benioff has previously stated will become the company’s next $1 billion product line.

Salesforce Eyes Social & Mobile to Sustain Growth

Some say that Oracle – a traditional seller of licensed software – has a business model that is ill-equipped to compete against “Software as a Service” vendors such as Salesforce.com. Unlike Oracle’s model, Salesforce.com does not sell software to its customers, but basically rents out it out to them and provides storage for customers’ data in the Cloud.

Oracle critics are wont to say that the company’s business model built on selling software is outdated, and that SaaS vendors’ rapid growth is proof of the SaaS model’s superiority. Indeed, all the evidence points to this as being true – Salesforce.com is growing much faster, whether one looks at revenues or profits.

Even so, Salesforce still has a lot to do. It might be booming, but there are numerous obstacles in the way of further growth. Oracle and Microsoft are still by far and away the most dominant enterprise tech firms, and so Salesforce has no choice but to work more closely with them if it wants to fully integrate its tools into their infrastructures. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff admitted this much back in 2011, when he gave an exclusive interview to theCUBE and stated that even a company like Facebook wouldn’t have gotten where it is today without the help of Oracle. Salesforce needs to do the same, and we’ve already made tentative steps in this direction, such as the data-sharing deal announced between it and Oracle last June.

Salesforce might be making progress in this direction, but at the same time Oracle and others have been wary of getting too cozy with it. Nevertheless, with Oracle’s Larry Ellison rumored to be making an appearance at Dreamforce next week, there could well be some kind of announcement, or at least an update, on the recent integrations between some of the companies’ products.

Aside from forging closer relationships with established enterprise tech platforms, the most crucial thing for Salesforce now is to become more social and more mobile, and it’s been making strong moves in that direction – most notably with its acquisitions, such as the $2.5 billion deal that saw it takeover ExactTarget last June.

In line with this strategy, Salesforce is using Dreamforce to woo the developer community. More than 20,000 of this year’s attendees are expected to be developers, most of them with one eye on the“hackathon” contest and the $1 million prize that’s on offer to whoever can come up with the highest scoring mobile application using Salesforce’s technology.