At Dreamforce this year Salesforce.com executives said the company is taking a more consultative role. The company is making good on that promise today with an agreement to acquire Model Metrics, a social cloud consulting services company. Model Metrics handles Salesforce.com deployments and builds custom Web and mobile applications built on the Salesforce.com back-end amongst other platforms.

Model Metrics is based in Chicago and was founded in 2003. Terms of the agreement with Model Metrics were not disclosed, but the acquisition is expected to close mid-Q4.

Salesforce.com has been an acquisition spree this year, picking up companies like Manymoon (on which its new Do.com service is based) and Radian6. Up to now Salesforce.com has focused mostly on other software-as-a-service companies.

Cloud consulting is big business – cloud consulting services are outpacing the cost of enterprise software. It’s no wonder Salesforce.com wants a piece of that action. Larger companies like IBM, HP and Oracle have large consulting services, so this is a natural part of Salesforce.coms’ growth.

The acquisition will expand Salesforce.com’s ability to provide extensive customization, including mobile applications. This is especially interesting as Salesforce.com continues to explore the possibilities of the Heroku platform, which it acquired last year. Do.com, which launched in private beta last week, is already built on Heroku, but we haven’t seen much in the way of real enterprise applications from Salesforce.com on Heroku yet.