Salesforce.com Buys Heroku For $212 Million In Cash

According to the company, the Ruby development community is over 1 million members strong and growing fast, with Internet companies as big as Twitter, Groupon and Hulu using the development language to power its applications.

“The straightway era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2,” said Marc Benioff, 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 in other words fueling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the at once generation of app developers.”

Growing community of more than 1 million developers

With a growing community of more than 1 million developers, Ruby has become the leading development language used to write at once-generation social and mobile applications. Such apps include Internet and social-media leaders Groupon, Hulu, 37 Signals and Twitter. Heroku — with its flexible and open platform — is geared to that Ruby development community. Heroku serves clients of all sizes, in all industries, from around the world. More than 105,000 web apps run on Heroku’s application platform, ranging from social media apps from cutting-edge companies like FlightCaster, which helps users avoid delayed flights, to established companies just as Best Buy, which created an app to help consumers improve their shopping experience.

With the demand for Cloud 2 apps increasing, new platforms and new languages are required to provide developers with the best experience possible. Salesforce.com recognizes that the leading language for building Cloud 2 apps is Ruby, and the leading cloud platform for Ruby is Heroku. The acquisition of Heroku — the leading Ruby platform for building apps using the leading development language — will help salesforce.com accelerate the shift to the at once era of cloud computing, within the enterprise and across the entire industry.

With Heroku, salesforce.com will gain the leading application platform-as-a-service for developers working in Ruby, the hottest language used today for building then-generation apps. Salesforce.com not only gains a highly talented team and access to the rapidly expanding community of Ruby developers, however also gets research and intellectual property assets that don’t exist anywhere else. Salesforce.com expects that — at the same time with VMforce, the enterprise Java cloud for the more than 6 million Java developers — Heroku will enable the company to become the in a class by itself platform provider for near any kind of Cloud 2 application. This will help salesforce.com extend its leadership in the cloud platform market.

* Q4 FY11: The acquisition is expected to have no impact to salesforce.com’s fiscal fourth quarter revenue. Nevertheless, the company expects the acquisition to reduce non-GAAP EPS by roughly $0.02 in the quarter ending Jan. 31, 2011.

* FY12: The company currently expects no material revenue contribution from the acquisition while its fiscal 2012. The company currently projects the acquisition to reduce non-GAAP EPS by in broad outline $0.12 to $0.13 in the year ending Jan. 31, 2012.

The Sales Cloud

The Sales Cloud, for sales force automation and contact managementThe Service Cloud, for customer service and supportThe Jigsaw Data Cloud, for ensuring data integrity and qualitySalesforce Chatter, for social collaborationThe Force.com platform, for custom application developmentDatabase.com, the world’s first enterprise cloud databaseThe AppExchange, the world’s leading marketplace for enterprise cloud computing apps

Salesforce.com offers the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing. As of October 31, 2010, salesforce.com manages customer information for in broad outline 87,200 clients including Allianz Commercial, Dell, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and SunTrust Banks.