Heroku has been our default hosting platform for most of Ruby on Rails applications we have developed internally and for our clients. Heroku’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) service frees the development team from a lot of server management and deployment activities and concentrate on application business logic and deliver project in a more agile way.
So, it was a mixed feeling when Heroku has announced that they have been taken over by Salesforce, the SaaS CRM provider. It is great to see Ruby and Ruby on Rails getting to the next level, playing strong against industry heavy weights like Dot Net and Java. Its great to see how a truly useful product like Heroku, that too on infrastructure side, gets recognition and reward within three years of inception.
Salesforce is a big player in SaaS and now focussing on Cloud, and they surely know how to sell to enterprises. They are the original SaaS company which managed to change perception of software licensing and usage patterns. While Salesforce still have issues in selling Force.com platform to developers, I would not count out their marketing strength and new focus, given that they have launched Database.com in the same week as this take over announcement.
All this is good. The concern really about the kind of technological innovation and marketing focus Heroku will have now. Salesforce is seen more as a marketing innovator rather than technical innovator. Unlike Heroku, which is completely an open platform, Salesforce initial attempt at PaaS with Force.com locks developers and their applications on Salesforce platform.
Heroku focus entirely has been on Ruby on Rails while Salesforce has focused on Java and their own version of Java, Apex. Heroku team assures that they will be still focusing on same vision they started with, next year is going to prove this one way or the other.
One really bright spot has been about Ruby, there is a growing recognition that Ruby language’s inherent strengths are suited for the agile development and cloud infrastructure. In the words of CEO of Salesforce – “Ruby is the language of Cloud”, we gladly agree.