Salesforce Gains Ruby Application Platform With Heroku Acquisition

Salesforce.com has completed its acquisition of Heroku, a supplier of a cloud computing platform for developing Ruby-based applications, the company said Monday. Salesforce said the acquisition would help it capture a greater share of the public cloud services market.

Salesforce disclosed that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Heroku for $212 million at its Dreamforce conference last month.

"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 Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a statement late Monday. "With Heroku, our platform can become the next cornerstone of the next-generation of cloud computing."

While the bulk of Salesforce's revenue is still generated by its on-demand CRM and customer service applications, the company is positioning itself as a cloud platform technology supplier with its Force.com cloud application development system and its AppExchange online marketplace. The acquisition of San Francisco-based Heroku will broaden Salesforce's developer and ISV audience given that Ruby is used by more than a million developers and the Heroku platform powers more than 110,000 cloud computing applications.

At Dreamforce, Benioff said Salesforce would offer Heroku as a development service in conjunction with the Force.com platform, as well as continuing to provide it as a separate service.