Salesforce has confirmed that it will acquire Heroku for approximately $212 million in cash. According to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, the acquisition is expected to help the company prepare for the next era of cloud computing – known as Cloud 2.
“Cloud 2 is social, mobile and real-time. Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fueling this growing community,” he explained.
“We think this acquisition will uniquely position salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers.”
Indeed, Ruby is one of the top development languages used to write next-generation apps that are social, collaborative and deliver real-time access to information across mobile devices.
Heroku powers more than 105,000 of these apps, which are hosted on prominent social networking sites such as Groupon, Hulu, 37 Signals and Twitter.
So, how does the Heroku application platform work?
Well, it makes the deployment and management of next-generation cloud apps as easy as developing them.
To be sure, the platform features a workflow and interface designed to mirror how developers code.
Because the platform is a service, there are no virtual machines to manage, no software to install, and no hardware to manage and tune.
Instead, developers can focus on writing their code, and Heroku takes care of everything else – from deployment to scaling and quality of service.
So, with Heroku, Salesforce will gain the leading application platform-as-a-service for Ruby, along with talented devs and lucrative IP assets.
Together with VMforce – the enterprise Java cloud for the more than 6 million developers – Heroku is likely to help Salesforce become one of the major platform providers for nearly any kind of Cloud 2 application.
