Salesforce.com looks to be a developer destination with Heroku Ruby buy

08.12.2010
Salesforce.com, with its addition of Heroku's Ruby cloud application platform, wants to position itself as a destination for next-generation application developers. But rival cloud vendor Engine Yard believes the Heroku/Salesforce.com pairing, while validating Ruby on the cloud, is the wrong way to go.

was one of several announcements made this morning at the company's Dreamforce 2010 conference in San Francisco. The company also promoted its Cloud 2 concept involving social, mobile, and real-time computing and announced a partnership for IT service management with BMC. Salesforce.com also enunciated its vision of eight different Salesforce.com  clouds, which includes the Database.com platform announced this week as well as Heroku.

"Heroku is really designed by developers for developers. It's a true development environment," Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff said. He also cited Ruby as "the true language of Cloud 2." Ruby on Rails is supported by Heroku as well. The acquisition, added Parker Harris, Salesforce.com executive vice president, "puts us solidly in the platform-as-a-service market."

Heroku powers more than 105,000 Web applications. Salesforce.com argues that its Heroku property, combined with its VMforce Java cloud, makes the company the "unparalleled" platform provider for Cloud 2 applications. But at Engine Yard, which also offers cloud services for Ruby on Rails applications, an official was dismissive of Salesforce's grand plans.

"No respectable developer wants to be on Salesforce.com. This could drive even more developers [to Engine Yard's platform]," said Tom Mornini, Engine Yard CTO and co-founder, in an email. "Ruby is the language for the cloud. If you are building apps, and you are building on the cloud, you have to build with Ruby," Mornini said. The deal validates that, he said. "However, both Salesforce.com and Heroku's multi-tenancy approach is the wrong way to go. We believe virtualization is a better value for any type of company that has applications."