"The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2," CEO Marc Benioff said in the company's announcement. "Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fueling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers."
The acquisition is about extending Salesforce's leadership of the cloud, the company says. It's not satisfied with just its cloud-based business software, but wants to also become the platform for cloud-based development. The company also operates VMForce, an enterprise cloud platform for Java developers, in partnership with VMware.