On the back-office side, Salesforce has also been ramping up its cloud-based offerings with moves such as last year's acquisition of , a human resources management system that Salesforce relaunched in March, providing HR managers with a social interface they can use to shake up the traditional approach to employee tracking and performance reviews. With Rypple, employees as well as managers can provide feedback on a co-worker's performance or offer recognition of an accomplishment in a similar fashion as Facebook users can interact with their friends' status updates.

"If we're honest, many of our HR systems today have not kept pace with how we're communicating with our employees. They're on Twitter. They're on Facebook. They have embraced social. They live in the social world," says Monika Fahlbusch, Salesforce's senior vice president of global employee success, a euphemistic title for the company's head of human resources.

"Simply put, Salesforce Rypple is not your grandmother's HR system," she says.

Salesforce envisions its social enterprise tools extending into virtually every business process, from normally mundane functions like HR to public-facing operations like sales and customer service. Video-game-maker , for instance, has tapped Salesforce to engage with its customers, who frequently report glitches in games on various online forums. Activision has set up its own social hub to curate those complaints, and has incorporated applications such as Apple's FaceTime to help troubleshoot problems, and routinely interacts with gamers through its own app and social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

"This is our vision of the social enterprise," Kundra said. "The opportunity before us is to delight our customers and employees in a whole new way."