Salesforce.com, San Francisco's largest employer and conference host, announced today that it plans on leasing half of what will soon be the tallest office building west of Chicago. The deal for 714,000 square feet of office space in the Transbay Tower will rename the forthcoming 61-story skyscraper the "Salesforce Tower."

“Salesforce Tower represents an incredible milestone in our company’s history — it will be the heart of our global headquarters in San Francisco,” Salesforce Chairman, CEO and generally charitable tech guy Marc Benioff said in a canned statement to the press. “We founded Salesforce.com in San Francisco 15 years ago and this expansion of our urban campus represents our commitment to growing in the city.”

Mayor Ed Lee, meanwhile, thanked Benioff and co. with his usual mix of unabashed exuberance and cool buzzwords, saying: “I am proud and excited to be a part of this historic moment as we welcome salesforce.com to the Transbay neighborhood and to their iconic future home in the Innovation Capital of the World."

The $1.1 billion project formerly known as the Transbay Tower is scheduled to be completed in 2017 and will anchor the new Transbay District and transit hub. As part of the deal, Salesforce.com will occupy the bottom 30 floors of the tower, plus the 61st floor which will become a "high tech customer briefing center" according to COO George Hu. There will be some Salesforce signage included, but "unfortunately," Hu said, "there will probably not be a giant cloud at the 61st floor." Workers in the building will also get to take a funicular to the office in a building that some say kind of looks like a dick.

The tower lease will add to the CRM platform company's already massive amount of square footage around town. The company already leases 500,000 square feet a block away at 50 Fremont Street and will occupy all of another 30-story tower going up at 350 Mission Street.

As for Benioff's vision of a more horizontal, 2 million square foot campus in Mission Bay, that plan stalled two years ago in 2012, but the Chronicle reports today that the company is in talks to sell off four of that 14 acre plot to UCSF, which already carries the CEO's name.

Previously: All Transbay Tower coverage on SFist
[SFBiz]
[Chron]