With the public launch of its Force. com sites, Salesforce will not only be hosting a company's presence on the cloud, but also providing it the requisite tools to build, manage and integrate it - thereby aiming at turning its new sites into a next-generation Web experience.

As such, Salesforce's Force. com sites - first announced by the company at its Dreamforce conference in November - will bring about flawlessness when it comes to tasks like tapping into an inventory database to keep an e-commerce tool up to date.

To give Force. com a test-run, Salesforce had already opened it to 85 customers, including notable enterprise names like Starbucks, Dell and NJ Transit. The preview saw the service deliver over 38 million page views, 350 million site hits, and provide more than 5 terabytes of data.

Salesforce is initially offering a free package on the Force. com Platform as a Service (PaaS) - which includes a free Web site as well as development space for one custom application. The free version includes up to 250,000 page views each month, with an aim to expedite the acceptance of cloud services.

Talking about the Salesforce endeavor, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said: "Force. com Free Edition will enable every company to experience success with cloud computing. This will empower anyone to build and run their first cloud computing app for free on Force. com."