GE is also a heavy Salesforce.com user, and its CEO, Jeff Immelt, will speak on Thursday in an "unpaid keynote" at Dreamforce, Benioff said.

This week's conference drew a reported 90,000 registered attendees, far more than the keynote hall at San Francisco's Moscone Center could hold.

Salesforce.com is trying to raise the event's profile even further with a string of celebrity guests. Rapper MC Hammer made a surprise appearance before Benioff hit the stage and performed a musical medley and dance routine along with an energetic crew of white-clad performers.

The keynote's flashy production values and Benioff's soaring rhetoric stood in contrast to the fact that many of the announcements Salesforce.com made Wednesday were for products that won't be released for some time, possibly more than a year.

"It used to be that they didn't really preannounce things," said Todd McKinnon, CEO of cloud identity management vendor Okta and formerly senior vice president of engineering at Salesforce.com from 2003 to 2009, in an interview before Benioff's keynote. During McKinnon's time at Salesforce.com, "we'd build something and announce it in real time," he said.