Heroku, the cloud platform that powers Ruby on Rails, is set to come under the salesforce.comumbrella. The cloud computing giant will purchase Heroku for $212 million.
As captured by the Business Insider in this post, Ruby on Rails is a programming language/platform used by a variety of startups due to its ease of use.
Heroku is a cloud platform available through Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) that is made especially for hosting the Ruby on Rails apps, making it popular with startups as well.
"We have a service that developers really love, and salesforce.com has the trust and credibility the most demanding customers expect," said Byron Sebastian, Heroku CEO, in a statement. "Together, we will provide the best place to run and deploy Cloud 2 apps. We believe this is the winning combination to bring cloud application platforms into the mainstream of the enterprise."
Some in the industry thought the most logical acquirer for Heroku was Amazon, especially since the popularity of the cloud platform with startups has been a huge part of the company’s success. The pairing between Salesforce and Heroku is a logical one, however, given the fact that Salesforce is all about the cloud.
"The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2," said Marc Benioff (News - Alert), chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "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. We think this acquisition will uniquely position salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers."
The community of developers is more than 1 million strong and still growing and Ruby has become the development language of choice used to write next-generation social and mobile applications. Apps relying on Ruby include Groupon, Hulu (News - Alert), 37 Signals and Twitter.
As the demand for Cloud 2 apps is growing, new platforms and new languages are needed to provide the best experience possible for developers. Salesforce.com (News - Alert) recognizes the role Ruby plays in building Cloud 2 apps. As the leading platform for Ruby is Heroku, which makes it a prime acquisition target for salesforce.com.
This transaction is expected to be completed in salesforce.com's fiscal fourth quarter ending Jan. 31, 2011, subject to customary closing conditions.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Stefania Viscusi