At its annual Dreamforce event on December 7, cloud computing services provider Salesforce.com unveiled its vision for Cloud 2 and unveiled six new cloud offerings. Addressing an audience of 30,000 online and onsite viewers from San Francisco, CEO Marc Benioff said all the major applications are moving to the cloud and now it’s the turn for platforms and databases to move to the cloud.

“The power of cloud computing goes beyond elasticity and inexpensive computing,” said Benioff. “At Salesforce we have 100,000 customers hosted on 1,500 Dell PCs and all these are shared systems.”

He spoke about Cloud 2, the next generation of enterprise cloud computing that is social, mobile and real- time. In this new computing paradigm applications are increasingly being created for the cloud, work forces are collaborating more on the cloud and using more than one mobile device to access applications on the cloud.

Speaking about his Cloud 2 vision Benioff said, “We have reworked our architecture on how we deliver services. We will now focus on all major languages and platforms. Why are we not building software like Facebook?”

To support this vision Salesforce unveiled new cloud services and products. It unveiled a new cloud service called Database.com. This service is built from the ground up to power new enterprise applications that are cloud, mobile and social. Database.com is open for use with any language, platform and device. It enables developers to focus on building great applications instead of tuning, maintaining and scaling databases.

In a release issued today Benioff said, “We see cloud databases as a massive market opportunity that will power the shift to enterprise applications that are natively cloud, mobile and social. For the first time, we are making Database.com, the database that is proven and trusted by our 87,000 customers, available as an open, stand-alone service to accelerate the creation of these new apps.”

The other cloud services in its portfolio are also enhanced in keeping with its new focus. These are Sales.com, Force.com, Service.com, Chatter and Jigsaw. Among the new applications that it announced are ISVforce.com, Siteforce.com, App.com and VMforce.com.

In a release after the webcast Salesforce informed that it also launched Chatter Free, a new edition of Salesforce Chatter, which is free of cost. Using the social invitation model popularized by Facebook, any Salesforce user can invite colleagues to collaborate with Salesforce Chatter. Chatter Free is poised to accelerate adoption of social collaboration throughout the enterprise. Chatter is the industry’s first enterprise collaboration app and platform.

Benioff also expressed concern about protecting the environment. “Databases are the biggest consumers of energy.” He suggested that by moving databases to the cloud, organizations can reduce its carbon footprint. “Your CO2 per transaction is 1.3 grams if you run it on premise. But for us at Salesforce it is reduced to just 0.09 grams because we use AppExchange,” he said.