Nine months ago, we announced a native cloud database service called Database.com. Today I am thrilled to announce that it is now generally available!

Fundamental shifts happening in the world are having a huge impact on how we design, build and interact with applications:

• Mobility has changed how we access applications and data. By 2013, 16 Billion mobile devices will be bought each year. As consumers, we have gotten used to having all of our apps and data at our fingertips, no matter where we are.
• The social revolution has changed how we connect and collaborate with each other. 22% of Internet time is spent on social applications like Twitter and Facebook. The number of social application users, now more than 1.1 billion, surpassed email users back in 2009.
• Cloud has arrived. Applications, platforms, and databases are all moving to the cloud with proven benefits in agility, simplicity, and openness.

While we can all relate to these trends in our personal lives, there is still a large divide between what we’ve gotten used to at home and the reality of the applications we use in the workplace. Leading companies like Toyota, Verizon, Bank of America, Groupon, Disney, and Burberry have bridged this divide by building integrated social and mobile applications for their employees, partners, and customers. These applications provide a level of collaboration and productivity that delights users, and the result is transformational for the business. We call this the Social Enterprise.

At the core of all of these apps is Database.com. We have exposed a rich set of APIs so it can be accessed from any modern framework, language or device. You can query your data from an application or establish a secure stream of updates to a mobile device. We’ve automated tuning, scaling, backups and recovery for you. The data you choose to store can easily and securely be shared with your ecosystem. Maintaining a social graph is a breeze. It all just works.

The core of our service has been powering the salesforce.com ecosystem for the last 12 years, now handling more then 500,000,000 transactions on a daily basis.

Database.com is a modern and open service that grew up and scaled in the cloud. It has been built with the needs of a social and mobile world at its core, not as an afterthought.

Welcome and thank you for joining us at the start of a long journey.