What if enterprise apps were built the way you’d build an agile Ruby app? What if they were a pleasure to work with, deploy, and manage? What if big companies could adopt the philosophies of Heroku and the Ruby community? What if your company actually preferred you use Heroku to build apps?
That’s the next level for Heroku. That’s where we want to go, so we’ve made a decision we’re excited to share: we have signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by salesforce.com. We expect the deal to close by January 31st.
Why Salesforce.com?
Salesforce.com is the original cloud company. They convinced the enterprise world to consume software as a service before Gmail, Basecamp, or Facebook existed. They created one of the world’s first platforms-as-a-service and helped popularize the term. They get it.
Heroku always aspires to be trusted by more customers with their data and applications. Salesforce.com has achieved a level of trust and credibility unparalleled in the cloud. They are trusted today by the largest companies on the planet to store their most sensitive data. And their sales and support organizations are second to none.
We have long been fans of salesforce.com due to the unusual philosophies they share with us:
No software, no private cloud
There is so much value provided to customers when they consume services rather than buying software and running it themselves. Salesforce.com is religious about not selling software for private cloud use, and so are we.
Abstraction = Value
Don’t make users, customers, or developers do anything they don’t have to. Let them focus 100% on their data and their applications. Most products are more hands on and less abstract than Heroku. Salesforce.com however, is even farther down the abstraction curve than we are.
Multi-Tenancy
Multi-tenancy enables continuous upgrades and improvements, maintainability, and scale. Multi-tenancy is an architectural decision key to how both Heroku and salesforce.com have achieved success.
Salesforce.com Loves Heroku
Salesforce.com loves our developers and the community and culture they have brought to our platform. They love our maniacal focus on the developer experience. They love that we are a 100% open platform, enabling openness and choice everywhere we possibly can. They love that we support the tools and languages and architectures of the next generation of web apps.
Salesforce.com aspires deeply to these same goals and sees Heroku as leading the way. Together we can bring an open platform for modern apps to enterprise customers.
To hear this in the words of salesforce.com, see founder Parker Harris’s blog post: What I Love About Heroku.
Independence
Salesforce.com loves who we are and wants to preserve our brand, product, our values, and our roadmap. Though we’re joining forces, Heroku will remain independent.
This means the whole Heroku team, the founders, our technology and services, our free offerings for developers, our exciting roadmap, existing customer signup process, and most importantly our philosophies will remain intact and unchanged.
Our focus on design and user experience will stay as sharp as ever; we will stay purple. The Heroku you know will continue to grow.
Our roadmap stays the same, but we can do more of it, faster. Joining forces with salesforce.com gives us an enormous amount of fuel to keep building the platform toward the vision we’ve always had.
Ruby
This deal is a victory and validation for all of our early adopters, our passionate users and customers, and for the Ruby community as a whole. The combination of salesforce.com’s trust and credibility with Heroku’s developer-focussed platform will be an incredible force pushing Ruby into the mainstream.
Heroku has been designed from the beginning to support multiple languages, but Ruby will always be our first love.
As we’ve talked about before, over the long run we want to constantly support more use cases and allow developers to choose the right tool for the job, like we did with our experimental Node.js support. Joining forces with salesforce.com doesn’t change this; we will add other languages when and where we feel it advances those goals.
Amazon and Ecosystem
Our relationship with Amazon Web Services will remain unchanged. We are huge fans of Amazon’s EC2 and the fast growing ecosystem of cloud services within it, and have no plans to leave. We are likely to add additional infrastructure providers over time to support a variety of customer use cases, and as above, we will follow the same path and decision making process we always have.
Great for Developers and Customers
Heroku will always be focused on developers above all else. Salesforce.com deeply understands why that is valuable and is making an enormous bet that we will continue to make developers happy. Not only does Salesforce.com want us to continue on unchanged, but they hope through this merger some of Heroku’s philosophies will rub off on them.
With salesforce.com’s trust and credibility, it will soon be a no-brainer to convince your company to use Heroku for your important projects.
With salesforce.com’s huge reach, we will be able to grow the ecosystem faster. This means more add-on providers with more great cloud service options for developers.
For customers, this means we will soon provide better sales processes for larger organizations, add more trust and security for data and applications, achieve more IT policy compliance, and provide more premium support options.
Great for Add-on Providers
The salesforce.com brand plus accelerated growth of the developer base, the types of applications on the platform, and the number and size of customers all bring huge opportunity for add-on providers.
Our Commitment
The founders and the whole team at Heroku are 100% committed to the long term vision we have shared since the beginning. This is Heroku going to the next level; a chance to further our vision, to take things to a larger scale, and to reach a wider audience than ever before with our product and our message about next-generation deployment.
We couldn’t be more amped!
The Heroku Team
Official press release here.