Salesforce.com, an enterprise cloud computing company, on Tuesday launched Database.com, which is touted as the world’s first enterprise database built for the cloud.

The company said database.com is built from the ground to power new enterprise applications that are cloud, mobile and social.

Database.com is open for use with any language, platform and device, enabling developers to focus on building great applications instead of tuning, maintaining and scaling databases, it said.

The New York Stock Exchange listed company said database.com is now designed and will be made available as a standalone cloud database service in 2011.

“We see cloud databases as a massive market opportunity that will power the shift to enterprise applications that are natively cloud, mobile and social,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com in a statement.

Salesforce.com said the industry shift to mobile apps, to a social data model, and to an event-driven, push model all require a new kind of cloud database to support the next generation of enterprise apps.

Database.com will free developers to spend their time building valuable applications instead of managing and maintaining database management systems and hardware, the company said.

For CIOs, IT departments and developers, Database.com provides many benefits over client/server databases:

In a statement, the company database.com is open, which allows developers to write their applications in Java, C#, Ruby, PHP and other languages.

“Developers can run their apps on any platform - Force.com, VMforce, Amazon EC2, Google AppEngine, Heroku or Microsoft Azure. And their apps can run natively on any device, like an Android phone, Blackberry, iPad, or iPhone. These apps can all call database.com APIs securely over the Internet. These can be small apps needed by only a few users, or massive apps capable of scaling to support hundreds of thousands of users,” the company said in a statement.

Citing examples, the company said “iPhone and iPad app developers can write native iOS apps, which run natively on Apple devices and connect to Database.com over the Internet.Android developers can also write native Android apps using Java. These apps run natively on Android devices and connect to Database.com.”

“Web developers can build apps on Amazon EC2 using PHP and connect to database.com and Java developers can write an application that runs on VMforce and connects to Database.com,” the company said.

Database.com services, including database access, file storage and automatic administration will be available.

Chatter Free launched

Separately, Salesforce.com launched Chatter Free, a new edition of its chatter that is completely free.

Using the social invitation model popularized by Facebook, now any Salesforce user can invite colleagues to collaborate with Salesforce Chatter.

The company said Chatter Free will accelerate adoption of social collaboration throughout the enterprise. Leveraging the social features popularized by Facebook and Twitter -- such as profiles, status updates and real-time feeds –Chatter lets employees “follow” documents, people, business processes and application data, resulting in a new level of productivity that crosses departments and organizational barriers.

Salesforce.com said Chatter is yet the latest example of the shift to Cloud 2, the next generation of enterprise cloud computing that is social, mobile and real- time.

“Cloud 2 started with consumer social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, which people use every day to connect and collaborate around what matters most to them in their personal lives. Until Chatter, companies could not leverage Cloud 2 capabilities within their enterprise,” the company said in a statement.

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