Salesforce.com set to acquire Heroku

Salesforce.com to pay £134m for Ruby-based platform-as-a-service company Heroku

Software-as-a-service provider Salesforce.com has signed a agreement to acquire Ruby application platform-as-a-service Heroku for £134m.

Heroku is a cloud application platform that uses open source programming language Ruby. The multi-tenant platform hosts customer applications and will benefit from regular platform improvements.

The deal is set to be completed by end of January 2011 and will see Salesforce looking to widen its customer net to include more developers.

"The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.

"Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fuelling this growing community," he added.

"We think this acquisition will uniquely position Salesforce as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers."

Ruby has become the leading development language for writing next-generations apps that are collaborative, and delivered in real-time across mobile devices. Founded in 2007, Heroku now powers more than 105,000 apps.

The deal has been approved by Heroku's board of directors and stockholders, and is expected to be finalised by the end of January.