OK, a lot of people are saying this is bad news for developers. They may be right but really, one of the good things about Heroku is that there is no lockin: seriously, it is simple to take any rack-based web app off of Heroku and other hosting options like self-managed EC2s, VPSs, etc.
I suspect that Saleforce will at least try hard to not lock the boat.
Can someone explain to me why Salesforce would be interested in acquiring Heroku? Sure they're both powering next gen businesses on the cloud, but that's a really far stretch...
I think it has something to do with the fact that Microsoft had just invested close to $10M in Heroku in the weeks prior to the acquisition (making Microsoft the biggest investee in Heroku). Right now, Salesforce is positioning themselves against the Microsofts and the Oracles (versus the smaller CRMs like ZoHo, Sugar, etc.); the Heroku purchase was probably more strategic than anything else...
Salesforce are an innovative company with a below average speed of infrastructure and above average prices targeted at the enterprise. Customer support is obviously one area where they can add value, but you'll pay for what you get,
It's a good post from Heroku though - they've addressed some of the key concerns such as stating they'll remain on EC2 and retain a lot of autonomy.
Why does it leave you wondering that? Because the barometer of success is an early exit?
Engine Yard and Heroku are two different companies with very different products, both offer fully managed hosting, but the similarities end there. Heroku is optimized for ease-of-use, automation, and keeping support costs low by enforcing a completely blackbox architecture. Engine Yard is optimized for flexibility. In addition to AppCloud on EC2, they have XCloud which provides PCI compliance, networked data shares, and other things certain applications might need. If Heroku meets your needs it might be better, but Engine Yard covers a much wider set of needs. I expect both companies are quite profitable. I'm not seeing any strategic errors on either side.
i am really looking forward to business app developers learning ruby so I can finally stop using curly brackets for my primary work! (except dicts in python)
I really don't like the "I stopped reading after that line" meme. It's basically a way of saying "I am militantly ignorant about the article under discussion because of my knee-jerk reaction to one sentence early in the article".
To be fair, Salesforce.com was basically the first hugely successful SaaS company. Calling it the "original cloud company" is a bit stilted, but still, they do have some claim to being "original".
To me 'first' and 'original' have a pretty specific meaning that does not translate in to 'hugely successful', that's a yardstick of marketing, not of originality.
The problem isn't the ambiguity of "first" or "original", but "cloud". As "cloud" is basically defined to whatever the marketing department has started labeling as "cloud" that week, "original cloud ..." can be similarly shoehorned.
Myth #13: There is only one type of cloud.
Truth: There are three layers of cloud services and deployment methods to support different business functions: Software-as-a-Service (Salesforce or Basecamp), Platform-as-a-Service (Engine Yard or Google’s App Engine), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Cloud Servers).
As far as enterprise applications are concerned Salesforce pretty much were the first supplier to convince CIOs that you could deliver a critical application like CRM as a service rather than an in-house hosted app.
I don't know that it's so much about disdain for Salesforce -- I'm just a bit concerned about what a large company like that can and will do to Heroku.
I suspect that Saleforce will at least try hard to not lock the boat.