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Salesforce.com announced Database.com, its hosted relational database service, in December. Since that time it's clear that Salesforce.com is far from alone in the market for offering stand-alone, cloud-hosted databases. There are at least four other competitors, with more on the horizon. And one of those is a company all too familiar to Salesforce.com: Microsoft.

Although customers have been able to install Oracle or MySQL in on commodity cloud instances for years, these services all provide databases specifically designed for the cloud.

Cloud computing blogger Chirag Mehta and Constellation Research Group principal analyst R "Ray" Wang published today a list of their cloud computing predictions for 2011. The pair sees public cloud adoption stalling temporarily, the spread of the app store model in the enterprise, the convergence of Development-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service and an overall simplification of the technology landscape as some of the most important trends in cloud computing in 2011.

The value of cloud computing is reaching another giant of the business world with some help from WeoGeo, an emerging geodata service provider.

Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI) is developing a "Data as a Service" (DaaS) platform that it is calling "Project Miami". The company will use the WeoGeo platform to offer its geodata to Pitney Bowes customers. PBBI will integrate WeoGeo as a SaaS. Project Miami will go live in June.

LongJump, a company based out of Sunnyvale, California, has introduced a Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) product that offers you an easy way to build a database application backend for your website and business. With LongJump, database setup is simplified - you no longer need to worry about server provisioning, redundancy, backups, patching, or any of the other IT complexities involved with running your own servers. Instead, you just sign-up with LongJump, set up your data structure and permissions, and connect your web services.