Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced it has completed its acquisition of Heroku, the privately held cloud platform for writing Ruby-based applications. The acquisition positions salesforce.com to take a greater share of the public cloud services market, projected by IDC to reach $55.5 billion in 2014.
Heroku is the leading Ruby platform-as-a-service, built from the ground up to work in an open environment and take advantage of the Ruby language. Ruby has become the leading development language used to write Cloud 2 apps that are social, collaborative and deliver real-time access to information across mobile devices. Today, Heroku powers more than 110,000 apps, written by an avid following of Ruby developers.
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“Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform and Ruby is the language of the future, driving the next generation of cloud applications that are real-time, social and mobile,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “With Heroku, our platform can become the cornerstone of the next-generation of cloud computing.”
“Cloud app platforms are redefining how applications are built and run — with an order of magnitude improvement in developer productivity and business agility,” said Byron Sebastian, Heroku CEO. “We’re excited about accelerating Heroku’s — and Ruby’s — momentum in leading this industry transformation.”
Accelerating the Enterprise Shift to Cloud 2
Salesforce.com anticipates that the acquisition will help it attract and serve a critical mass of developers, customers and ISVs wanting an open, scalable and trusted Cloud 2 platform. Heroku and salesforce.com share a common vision of providing an open and portable programming environment that doesn’t require customers to take on the expense or maintenance headaches that come with buying and deploying hardware and software. In fact, Heroku was built with the same multi-tenant philosophy that is the hallmark of salesforce.com’s Force.com platform.
Salesforce.com not only gains a highly talented team and access to the rapidly expanding community of Ruby developers, but also gets technology and intellectual property assets that don’t exist anywhere else. Salesforce.com expects that — together with VMforce, the enterprise Java cloud for the more than 6 million Java developers — Heroku will enable the company to become the leading platform provider for a broad array of Cloud 2 applications.
