Starting August 30, Salesforce.com will gather partners, customers, developers and cloud experts here to San Francisco for the Dreamforce ’11 conference. Billed as “the cloud computing event of the year,” Salesforce has filled the Dreamforce agenda with thought leaders like Google chairman Eric Schmidt, former federal CIO Vivek Kundra, and, ahem, Metallica.

Metal bands aside, Dreamforce’s headline this year is “Welcome To The Social Enterprise.” Apparently, “there’s a post-PC revolution underway,” and the enterprises that thrive will be the ones that are mobile, open, and social. And Salesforce is promising that its roster of cloud experts will be on hand to provide a roadmap to getting there.

Moreover, Dreamforce offers all the standard features of a vendor conference: training sessions, partner breakout panels, previews of the next wave of Salesforce.com features, a showcase for the cloud CRM provider’s ISV partners (like LiveOffice) to show off what they’ve been working on, and so forth.

Personally, I’m looking forward to the evening’s entertainment. TalkinCloud does its best to get to as many SaaS and cloud provider events around the country as it can. But it’s not often that we get the chance to see Metallica play a vendor dinner. And apparently Will.i.am is on hand to DJ the festivities.

Regardless, I’m already starting to hear the buzz building ahead of Dreamforce ’11. We may not be sure if Salesforce will use the conference to announce the acquisition of social media help desk Assistly. But we do know that the SaaS CRM provider has its eyes on big cloud profits.

We’ll offer ongoing updates from Dreamforce 11 throughout the week.