The big-picture goal is to carry out on an “incredible new vision for what it means to market and how to transform your company and just get much closer to your customers,” to use the words of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

At least for one marketing and advertising company on hand to talk up the Salesforce news on Tuesday, the integration between the CRM and social publishing is a welcome improvement.

“What Salesforce talked about today is something we had to do a little bit more manually before but just one more step in the evolution of our craft,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital.

It does seem that contacting leads on social media in response to what people say could bring about more deals and turn whiny users into advocates. What Salesforce is trying to do here is make the most of its CRM service — and also grow it — to help advertisers and marketers do their jobs better. Salesforce has already signed up WPP Group, Mindshare, Resolution and other big companies, and if results beat out other options, the more than $1 billion Salesforce spent on the two social listening and publishing companies enabling the new CRM-publishing connection could pay off.

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Starting this summer, customers paying to use the Salesforce customer-relationship-management (CRM) system and the Social.com publishing and monitoring tools will be able to combine both with the new functions. Gordon Evans, vice president of product marketing for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, said he expects customers to be primarily advertising and marketing agencies, big companies with in-house marketing and advertising operations, and gaming companies that run lots of advertising campaigns.

Once the new features are in place, if an ad agency wants to run a targeted Facebook or Twitter ad, it will be possible to aim the ad at people in the client’s lead pipeline. Those people are already documented in the CRM, waiting to be contacted or otherwise encouraged to close on a deal; it’s just a matter of using the existing intelligence in conjunction with social-ad publication tools to try to reach them in new ways. If more potential leads get thrown into the CRM, the ad will be able to target them, too. Users will be able to view tweets emerging in real time and perhaps uncover new leads. They can also manage multiple campaigns and compare them all to figure out which ones generate the highest click-through rates and cost per click.

Salesforce.com is adding customer-relationship management tailoring to social publishing tools.

The combined capability relies on pieces of software resulting from Salesforce’s acquisitions of Radian6 and Buddy Media, which together cost Salesforce more than $1.01 billion. More new features are surely on the way. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in February that he wants to make more acquisitions this year, particularly in marketing — and adding more mobile functionalities is a focus this year, too.

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Redpoint Ventures led the Series A round, and Andreessen Horowitz, the Social+Capital Partnership, Sutter Hill Ventures and others also contributed.

Based in Palo Alto, Calif., the company focuses on sales operations that keep their leads in Salesforce and other cloud-based tools such as Eloqua and Marketo, although Infer Co-founder and CEO Vik Singh said it’s also possible for the software to hook in to on-premise appliances.

Once signed up with Infer — Box, Jive Software, Tableau Software, Yammer, Zendesk and other companies are already paying customers — the system inspects historical sales information to check which deals have been sealed and which fell apart. That becomes training data for a model that scans “hundreds of signals of external data” to get a sense of which potential leads the company stands a chance of closing. Inputs include news articles, social-media accounts, website-traffic data, industry data, financial data, legal data, trademark data — “anything we can get that can give us more of a complete picture on who the customer is,” Singh said. Users can determine the weight of certain types of information.

Users also set priorities for the scoring of leads. “Do you want a model where the higher the score, the more likely (you are) to win (a deal), or do you care more about conversion, or do you care more about lifetime revenue, or deal size? We build the model based on that,” Singh said. It’s not just a neat way to prioritize leads; Singh said many Infer customers have boosted conversion rates with the tool.

Infer data integrated in Salesforce.com

Before starting Infer, Singh spent some time at Google, where he focused on machine-learning methods for automatically providing answers to questions users type into the search box. Another former Googler, one-time chief information officer Douglas Merrill, co-founded a different company that uses lots of external data to make determinations: ZestFinance, formerly known as ZestCash, extracts information from 70,000 sources to figure out if a lender should make a loan.

The broader strategy the two companies have in common — making predictions based on data — has become more popular in recent years, as companies merge and grow data sets to create more than the sum of their parts. In this case, it seems that the approach could garner wide adoption as a few companies optimize the time of their sales and marketing employees and pull ahead of their competitors, and other companies might want to do the same thing to catch up.

Of course, if Salesforce or Oracle acquires Infer, then adoption could come even faster.

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But over the last year, the discussion has morphed more into how cloud offers companies flexibility and agility and there’s growing realization that for stable, non-variable workloads, cloud — even public cloud — may not be the cheapest option at all. But that flexibility for intermittent or variable workloads remains the public cloud’s siren call. Check out posts from Virtual Geek and Cloudave for more thinking on this trend.

So the reason to go to cloud is no longer price but being able to move fast — deploy, re-deploy, and un-deploy workloads as needed without having to buy servers and software that could become shelfware next week or next month.

IaaS follows SaaS arguments of the past

What’s interesting to me is that this debate is evolving much like the discussion around Software as a Service (SaaS) did a decade or so ago. Initially, when Salesforce.com was coming into its own, most of the sales pitch was around price. Salesforce was so much cheaper than Siebel Systems. (Remember Siebel Systems? It’s now part of Oracle).

At that time, Microsoft was getting into the CRM business with its own on-premises edition. It’s counter-pitch was: “Sure, Salesforce.com may be cheaper at first, until you use it for three years. Then Microsoft on-premises CRM is cheaper.”

Of course, when Microsoft started rolling out its own cloud-based CRM, that price-based argument dissipated. The new thinking was that “cloud” CRM is better because everyone’s on the same, latest release and you can add/subtract users easily. Salesforce.com’s message likewise evolved to mirror that same message — especially as the more feature-rich Salesforce.com package options started to get um, quite pricey. Then Salesforce’s benefits became that it freed companies from the tedium and expense of on-site server and software upgrades. You could focus on business and leave the IT heavy lifting to your provider.

Everest Group partner Scott Bils agrees that the thinking around cloud deployment motivation is happening. “No doubt the conversation has shifted from [total cost of ownership] to agility,” he said. A survey Everest conducted of about 350 attendees at last week’s Cloud Connect show reflects that trend.

Cloud Connect 2012 Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey

Customers surveyed cited reduced time to provision applications and infrastructure as their primary reason to move to cloud, followed by the cloud’s overall flexible capacity. TCO, on the other hand, came in way down the list. Now, remember, these people were at a cloud computing conference, so they may be more up to speed on these issues than the average IT user. But as Bils noted: “Interestingly, vendors still mistakenly believe [cost remains] the most important factor.”

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Salesforce says developers using its tools can build apps that tap into troves of legacy data from existing CRM customers.

Given these developments, and rumblings that public cloud king Amazon Web Services is gearing up its mobile development push, it looks like legacy cloud giants are crowding into a space pioneered by smaller, more focused providers of mobile back-end services. (GigaOM Pro analyst Janakiram MSV has a good take on choosing an MBaaS here — subscription required.)

Who needs an MBaaS?

Salesforce.com’s pitch is that, while there are tons of useful consumer mobile apps, enterprise apps to date are still lacking.  ”It’s hard to build mobile apps that don’t just look nice but are engaging and that comes down to data. They need to be connected into your work data,” said Adam Seligman, VP of developer relations at Salesforce.com. “You have to make it easy to build the apps, the client side stuff, but you also need those hooks into corporate data.”

The new mobile packs, which support three lightweight mobile frameworks — jQuery Mobile, Backbone.js and AngularJS — should help on the ease-of-development front.

Salesforce, which backs both Force.com and Heroku Platforms as a Service (PaaS), subscribes to the school of thought that a specialized Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) — from Parse, Kinvey, Kii or Stackmob — isn’t necessary. Those smaller competitors would no doubt argue that developers need to build applications that connect to myriad applications from many sources — not just those from one company.

Rackspace wraps up mobile stack in an easily deployable package

Rackspace already hosts “tons of mobile apps” but it wants to make it easier for developers and companies to deploy and run them, CTO John Engates said. So the San Antonio, Texas-based company wrapped up a mobile-focused technology stack as a sort of prepackaged cloud for that type of user.

“We want to streamline things. We put together a stack — including Linux, MySQL, PHP, Memcached, Varnish cache in a sort of blueprint that we can deploy consistently and quickly,” he said.

This backend runs in Rackspace’s public cloud infrastructure, but on cloud servers that are dedicated to that customer. “We’re basically running a single tenant infrastructure on a multi-tenant cloud,” Engates said. “Heroku is a multi-tenant platform that lives on Amazon, a multi-tenant infrastructure cloud. We’re trying to build a single-tenant platform atop a public cloud so you can build your own deployment and spec and scale it for what you need.”

Rackspace CTO John Engates

The entire stack is open source and developers can use their SDKs of choice to develop for any mobile device. Rackspace has also signed up some partners to work with its stack: FeedHenry, New Relic, Sencha, SOASTA, StackMob and Trigger.io.

“The idea there is you use our infrastructure but then SOASTA can test your application from many perspectives — not just Rackspace — and throw a load up there to make sure it scales before you deploy it,” Engates said.

Bring on the consolidation

As more of these bigger, broader “cloud” companies add mobile development and hosting capabilities, it may be time for consolidation in the MBaaS business to kick off for real.

Forrester senior analyst Michael Facemire said consolidation in the MBaaS space, which started to happen last year with Apigee’s acquisition of UserGrid, a pure-play MBaaS and Appcelerator’s buy of CocoaFish, will likely heat up now that these bigger players finally see how important mobile developers are to the future of their overall businesses.

And, it will be extremely interesting to see what Google has up its sleeve vis-a-vis Google App Engine (GAE). Oracle, a power among enterprise applications, will be another company to watch.

This story was updated at 7:50 a.m. PST with analyst comment

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Co-founders Leo Tenenblat and Tom Tobin both worked in product management on analytics at Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) giant Salesforce.com, where they saw the value of pushing out clear information to salespeople’s mobile devices.

With AppMesh, updates sync quickly between the iPad app and iPhone app. And if an app goes offline, it will sync and replicate to the Amazon Web Services public cloud once it goes back online. Users can export Salesforce data to the apps, although importing back to Salesforce is not currently possible. Android versions are planned. The apps automatically take note of salespeople’s emails and phone calls to potential clients. It also arranges email in different ways — by the size of the deal, by the time the deal opportunity closes and so on. The apps are free for teams of up to five people, and prices are determined on a case-by-case basis for larger user groups.

The AppMesh application for iPad lets salespeople track meetings, sales opportunities and emails.

The product is similar in some respects to Tylr Mobile, a startup that’s still in stealth mode. Meanwhile, some startups, such as Crushpath and Selligy, offer mobile apps for tracking sales relationships, and others, such as Yesware, deal in optimizing salespeople’s email boxes but not with mobile apps. There are also startups that aim to make the best of email but don’t draw from sales apps, such as Taskbox and Mailbox, which Dropbox acquired.

On top of that, it’s possible Salesforce itself could roll out more sophisticated features. After all, Salesforce plans several announcements around mobile offerings this year. Then again, Salesforce could move to acquire AppMesh or Tylr Mobile. The deal would make sense, because the products are intended to solve a real problem for salespeople.

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MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott

MuleSoft also announced its new “Anypoint Platform” which it paints as the hub for connecting elderly on-premises applications to the shiny, newer mobile and web-based apps that companies increasingly turn to.

The company supports all the major  publicly available application programming interfaces (APIs) — no mean feat since by its count there are about 13,000 of them now, up from about 100 in 2006. Back then, only new-fangled companies like Yahoo Amazon, and eBay offered APIs as a standard way to interact with their applications.

“The new enterprise feels different. You still have legacy stuff that needs to be connected to your newer SaaS and mobile platforms. Anypoint provides the blueprint to connect all that up,” said Ross Mason, MuleSoft founder and CTO said in an interview.

MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott said the business of connecting all these enterprise applications represents a $500 billion opportunity, but one for which it must compete with a bunch of legacy vendors including Tibco and IBM (with its wild world of WebSphere). In some areas it also competes with newer companies like Apigee, but mostly MuleSoft’s SaaS solution gives companies an option other than turning to third-party systems integrators or hand coding connections between applications.

Salesforce.com is also a new investor in this round joining previous funders  Hummer Winblad, Morganthaler Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAP Ventures and Bay Partners.

The latest cash infusion will help the company build up its sales and marketing presence and to keep building up its product. “We’re investing extremely heavily, this is all subscription based revenue which means this is a cash-consuming businesses,” Schott said.

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