Salesforce.com is embarking on a major push into the marketing capabilities game. Judging from the following two comments CEO and co-found Mark Benioff made during his May quarterly results conference call with analysts, their big DreamForce pow wow in September should be particularly interesting:

Benioff said he sees a multibillion-dollar opportunity for Salesforce in the marketing area and agrees with the prediction that chief marketing officers will soon be spending more on technology than CIOs. This trend plays into Salesforce’s investments in social listening company Radian6, the Heroku platform for building interactive marketing applications, the Site.com Web publishing service, and the Data.com cloud database.

“The questions for us are how do we build a full marketing suite, how do we become the marketing desktop, and how do we build the marketing front office,” Benioff said. “We’ll have a lot to say about that at Dreamforce in September.”

Leading analysts such as Forrester Research and others have long commented that there is a significant gap in the marketplace for a genuine “marketing application suite”.

Here’s a good commentary.