Salesforce buy Heroku for $212 million, eyes Ruby developers

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

The news, which comes out of Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference, is expected to be completed in the quarter ending Jan. 31.

With the move, Salesforce.com acquires an asset that can make it more of a development platform. Heroku, founded in 2007, has 1 million developers in its community and Ruby is the language of choice for many cloud applications.

In a statement, Salesforce.com CEO 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.

The game plan here is pretty clear. Salesforce.com wants to ramp its platform-as-a-service efforts. Salesforce.com expects that it will combine Heroku with VMforce, an enterprise Java platform, to offer a broad platform.

According to Salesforce.com, the acquisition will shave about 2 cents a share from the company's fourth quarter earnings. For fiscal 2012, Salesforce.com expects to take a hit of 12 cents to 13 cents a share.

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