After 2 days of the Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference, one message is clear:  The Cloud is not going away, and there’s plenty of room for everyone.

I attended the special pre-conference Cloudstock (sponsored by Salesforce) on Monday and one thing was certain:  everyone needs everyone to succeed in the cloud.  Using multiple cloud services is common placed, so you better get along with your friends.

Cloudstock, whose name is a spin off of the 1969 hippie event movement Woodstock, was held prior to Dreamforce, and had equal billing for all the major players in the Cloud industry.   Google, Amazon, Adobe, and eBay were just a few common household names at the event.

There are many companies in the SaaS, Paas, and IaaS space today, and it became increasing clear that everyone needs everyone else to keep the movement alive.  Bad press from one cloud company would reduce the consumer confidence for the whole industry.

For those who are not familiar with the lingo, I wrote about SaaS, Paas, and IaaS in a previous article:

• SaaS examples include Salesforce and Google Apps.
• PaaS examples include Force.com, Microsoft Azure and Google Apps Engine.
• IaaS examples include Amazon Web Services and VMware.

That leads us into the first real day of Dreamforce. 

It started off as the usual evangelistic Cloud message by Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff.  In last decade, the world has changed the web experience as it blends in with the user experience.  The most changes include:

• how we access Internet (from smart phone, notebook/netbook/tablet and PCs)
• how we access search (Facebook, YouTube, and Google)
• how we access information (through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)

That leads us to Chatter.  Benioff updated the latest Chatter success and pricing schemes of Chatter Free, Chatter Plus and Chatter.com (due to be released Feb 2011).  From the demo, it appears Chatter.com will be a free, Mobile, Viral social network similar to Twitter and Facebook and a close  competitor to Yammer.

But the biggest news was the announcement of Database.com

Database.com keeps the main theme of enterprise applications focusing on cloud, mobile and social.

Database.com is open for use with any language, platform and device.  That means you can mix different cloud services such as Amazon Web Services along with Database.com.  The openness of Database.com is the key to its success.

Cloud services was perceived as reducing costs and prevent the expensive capital investment in purchasing hardware that may be overkill.  However, after attending Cloudstock, the cloud appears to be a mainstream option.

Database.com, which will be available as a standalone service in 2011, will be free for 3 users and up to 100,000 records and 50,000 transactions per month.  After that, it will be priced at $10 per month for each set of 100,000 records beyond the first 100,000 and $10 per month for each set of 150,000 transactions beyond the first 50,000. That’s the price for basic services, which includes database access, file storage and automatic administration.

Database.com Enterprise services will be priced at $10 per user per month and include user identity, authentication and row-level security access controls.

Database.com has also received some of the most stringent security certifications in the industry, including ISO 27001, SAS 70 Type II and SysTrust.

More on Day 2 tomorrow.  (or Day 3 depending on how you look at it)