

Heroku: The Next Level (Salesforce.com acquisition) - vamsee
http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/12/8/the_next_level/

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mark_l_watson
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.

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iag
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...

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smysore
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...

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jot
Leaves me wondering if Heroku is to Engine Yard as Mint was to Wesabe. Good
people, poor strategic decisions.

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dasil003
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.

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bobx11
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)

If you are at DF email me: df[at]ccp0.com

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digitallogic
"Salesforce.com is the original cloud company."

I stopped reading after that line.

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philwelch
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".

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andreyf
I think what digitallogic is saying is that based on this heuristic, this
article isn't worth reading or discussing.

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philwelch
There's a paradox, then, in the fact that he submitted a comment at all.

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sabat
I'm having trouble seeing this as anything but bad news.

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jpwagner
Can someone please explain the disdain for Salesforce around here?

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sabat
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.

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jpwagner
So any acquisition of Heroku would've been "bad news"?

