Salesforce to buy cloud firm Heroku

Salesforce.com said Wednesday that it will acquire Heroku, a cloud platform for writing applications in the Ruby programming language, for $212m.

The news of the $212m (£134m) deal, which comes out of Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference, is expected to be completed in the quarter ending 31 January.

With the move, Salesforce.com acquires an asset that can make it more of a development platform. Heroku, founded in 2007, has one million developers in its community and Ruby is the language of choice for many cloud applications.

In a statement, Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff said Heroku will help its platform-as-a-service efforts. Heroku currently has 105,000 Ruby apps in its ecosystem. The idea behind Heroku is that developers write the code and the company takes care of deployment, scaling and service quality.

For more on this ZDNet UK-selected story, see Salesforce buy Heroku for $212 million, eyes Ruby developers on ZDNet.com.