Although the space seems way past military age, CEO Marc Benioff sees a “massive market opportunity” and means to send database-as-a-service bombers over Oracle and cripple the hand that wrote one of the first checks that got Salesforce off the ground.

He’s turning Salesforce.com’s underlying old-fashioned Oracle database into a standalone cloud database to be called database.com when it comes out sometime next year.

Salesforce must have forgotten that Microsoft and Amazon have cloud databases when it said that database.com is “the world’s first enterprise database built for the cloud.”

Database.com is supposed to power new-generation enterprise applications that are cloud, mobile and social and need an event-driven, push model.

The apps can be small or scale to support hundreds of thousands of users but apparently the thing’s not for high-volume transaction-based systems.

It can reportedly be used with any language, platform and device. That includes Java, C#, Ruby and PHP; Amazon EC2, Google AppEngine and Microsoft Azure as well as the company’s own Force.com, VMforce and Heroku; and widgets like an Android phone, Blackberry, iPad, or iPhone.

They will be able to call database.com APIs over the Internet.

Like Salesforce’s VMforce Java alliance with VMware and its acquisition of Heroku, database.com is very developer-focused and altogether very platform-y.

Now imagine all those destabilized MySQL folks.

One can expect a relational data store including tables, relationships, a wide variety of field types, triggers and stored procedures, a query language and enterprise search; file storage for documents, video and images; familiar SOAP and REST APIs; a pre-built social data model for feeds, user profiles, status updates and a following model for all database records; Internet scale with automatic tuning, upgrades, backups and replication to remote data centers, and automatic creation of sandboxes for development, test and training; enterprise search and various developer toolkits.

Salesforce says Basic Database.com services will initially be free for three users, up to 100,000 records and 50,000 transactions/month; $10/month for each set of 100,000 records beyond that; and $10/month for each set of 150,000 transactions beyond that. The prices include file storage and automatic administration.

Database.com Enterprise Services are expected to run $10/user/month and include user identity, authentication and row-level security access controls.

Garter says the database market is worth $21.1 billion.

It’s called the first mission-critical deployment environment for enterprise Java apps in the cloud. It’s still in the oven though and won’t be available as developer preview until later this year when pricing will be announced.

This “enterprise” cloud will be called VMforce and will ride on Salesforce’s Force.com platform. The two companies say they’re both going to sell and support the thing, targeting the six million-odd Java developers that are supposed to be out there, including the two million-odd developers using the Spring framework, and get them building so-called Cloud 2 apps that are social – or at least collaborative – and work on any mobile device like the iPad in real-time.

They say VMforce will “dramatically simplify how enterprises and enterprise Java developers can harness the economics of cloud computing without compromising the flexibility, control and choice they require.”

According to a canned statement attributed to VMware CEO Paul Maritz, “Companies are looking for solutions that deliver the benefits of cloud computing while leveraging existing resources, expertise and infrastructure. By creating a dramatically simplified solution for modern application development, VMforce is a significant step forward in offering our customers a path that bridges existing internal investments with the resources and flexibility of the cloud.”

VMforce is supposed to support standard Java code, such as plain old Java objects (POJOs), Java Server Pages (JSPs) and Java servlets, through the Spring Framework. Java apps built with Spring promise to be easy to port to VMforce and vice versa. VMforce is supposed to make them scale automatically.

It’s also supposed to be global and obviously provide a vSphere-based virtualization platform as well as orchestration and management technology, a relational cloud database, a development platform and collaboration services, application run-time, development framework and tooling.

Naturally Red Hat, which wants to compete with VMware, thinks JBoss is a better app development platform for the cloud, that it is easier, seamless, has a broader user base, and a broader range of apps can be developed.

VMforce will use the Spring Framework and the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite. VMforce apps will run on the tc Server run-time, the enterprise version of Apache Tomcat, the lightweight application server that’s supposed to optimized for virtual and cloud environments.

As part of Force.com, the apps will have access to Salesforce’s newfangled Chatter Services, its Facebook-like collaboration widgetry. And as part of Force.com, developers will have access to its pre-built business services that can be configured into their apps without any custom coding, stuff like search, identity and security, workflow, reporting and analytics, a Web Services integration API and mobile deployment.

VMware’s vCloud technology is supposed to automatically manage the software stack that powers VMforce applications. It’s called the Java applications’ onramp to the cloud, automating their wiring to the Force.com database and managing the underlying vSphere virtualization platform.

It’s rigged up a thing it calls a Service Cloud, touting it as the next generation in customer service.
The object is “to capture every conversation and leverage every community expert in the cloud” – where, according to Salesforce, 50% of all service conversations already take place – by linking to chatty social networks like Facebook as well as Google Search (the first place people go for an answer) and Amazon’s cloud.

The way Salesforce see it by capturing these conversations – and funneling them into a knowledge base – “the Service Cloud empowers companies to deliver the expertise of the community to customers, agents and partners.”

It claims the Service Cloud represents the future of customer service and has Gartner analyst Michael Maoz say, “Ultimately, organizations will have to change their singular emphasis on tools for agents to a broader strategy that also supports the role of community experts.”

The underlying Service Cloud widgetry is being built on the company’s Force.com platform coupled with assets from the InStranet knowledge management software for call centers that Salesforce acquired last August for $31.5 million, and involves a bundle of software that costs $995 a month to start.

Salesforce says the software package – some of which is already available separately and used for customer service – can be used to create an online customer community with unlimited use for up to 250 customers; set up a contact center with up to five agents; connect with Facebook and Google Search; and invite up to five partners to participate.

Service reps should be able to contact customers via phone, e-mail and chat.

By the way, that total service outage that Salesforce customers experienced last week doesn’t seem to have fazed the company or the cloud’s advance any.