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Salesforce.com today announced to acquire Heroku for US$212 million for its Ruby-based cloud app development platform. The transaction is expected to complete by 31 Jan 2011.

Founded in 2007, the 30-strong Heroku is a San Francisco-based cloud app platform for writing Ruby-based apps. The Heroku Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is said to "make deploying, managing and scaling next-generation Web applications as easy as writing them." 

Heroku features a workflow and interface that mimics how developers work. Its multi-tenant architecture frees developers from managing virtual machines, installing software, and managing complicated platform stacks.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, said, "The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2," said. "Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application Platform-as-a-Service for Cloud 2 that is fueling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers."

"We have a service that developers really love, and salesforce.com has the trust and credibility the most demanding customers expect," said Byron Sebastian, Heroku CEO. "Together, we will provide the best place to run and deploy Cloud 2 apps. We believe this is the winning combination to bring cloud application platforms into the mainstream of the enterprise."

Heroku is a Ruby PaaS built to work in an open environment. Ruby has become one of the leading development languages used by more than one million developers. The Ruby language is used to write next-generation apps that are social, collaborative and deliver real-time access to information across mobile devices. Today, Heroku powers more than 105,000 apps in the Ruby programming language.

With the Heroku acquisition, salesforce.com hopes to increase its worldwide market share for public IT cloud services, which will grow 27% year on year to US$55.5 billion in 2014, according to IDC.