Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 205 posts

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#31

Post by bigiain »

plinkplonk wrote: post #18

This is great news for Heroku and YC (congratulations folks!). That said, does anyone have any insights on why exactly SalesForce would buy Heroku? What is the business rationale? "This is Salesforce’s fifth acquisition this year. Earlier purchases include Activa Live, Sitemasher and Jigsaw. Salesforce.com also spent $170 million to fully acquire its Japanese subsidiary, Salesforce Japan." Anyone see a pattern? I don…

I wonder how much its just Mark poking Larry with a stick.

"So you bought Java, eh? Who cares? I don't need to rely on Java, I've got all the cool kids and their RoR apps!"

(212M is an expensive stick though...)

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#32

Post by fookyong »

wccrawford wrote: post #22

I really hate it when people to give arbitrary numbers to things like 'Cloud 2'. It's still just cloud computing. 'Cloud 2' doesn't actually -mean- anything. It's not a standard. It's not like you can say something is or isn't Cloud 2 by any objective means. It's marketing speak, and who exactly is he marketing it to? All developers see right through it and know it doesn't mean anything. All clients only care that th…

The quote came from a press release. He's not talking to developers, he's talking to journalists and shareholders.

What would you call it?

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#33

Post by hristov »

plinkplonk wrote: post #18

This is great news for Heroku and YC (congratulations folks!). That said, does anyone have any insights on why exactly SalesForce would buy Heroku? What is the business rationale? "This is Salesforce’s fifth acquisition this year. Earlier purchases include Activa Live, Sitemasher and Jigsaw. Salesforce.com also spent $170 million to fully acquire its Japanese subsidiary, Salesforce Japan." Anyone see a pattern? I don…

One can make a pretty good case that Heroku and the like is where all web development is headed pretty soon.

One thing that can be gleaned from the history of languages and computing platforms is that once computing performance started skyrocketing, it has been the easiest languages and platforms that have been winning. And RoR is very easy and Heroku is a very easy way to deploy and host RoR.

If Heroku becomes the place to be for commercial web apps, if it becomes the visual studio for web apps, those 200 mill will look like a steal.

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#34

Post by dawson »

pavs wrote: post #20
dawson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2 ,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com I don't think we have anything to worry about...

I do think we have something to worry about when management type milks terms like "web 2.0" and now "Cloud 2.0" and "social".

I was being sarcastic :)

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#35

Post by [deleted] »

plinkplonk wrote: post #18

This is great news for Heroku and YC (congratulations folks!). That said, does anyone have any insights on why exactly SalesForce would buy Heroku? What is the business rationale? "This is Salesforce’s fifth acquisition this year. Earlier purchases include Activa Live, Sitemasher and Jigsaw. Salesforce.com also spent $170 million to fully acquire its Japanese subsidiary, Salesforce Japan." Anyone see a pattern? I don…

[deleted]

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#36

Post by notahacker »

plinkplonk wrote: post #18

This is great news for Heroku and YC (congratulations folks!). That said, does anyone have any insights on why exactly SalesForce would buy Heroku? What is the business rationale? "This is Salesforce’s fifth acquisition this year. Earlier purchases include Activa Live, Sitemasher and Jigsaw. Salesforce.com also spent $170 million to fully acquire its Japanese subsidiary, Salesforce Japan." Anyone see a pattern? I don…

The developer-friendly workflow of Heroku meshes very nicely with Salesforce's platform building strategy.

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#37

Post by ig1 »

plinkplonk wrote: post #18

This is great news for Heroku and YC (congratulations folks!). That said, does anyone have any insights on why exactly SalesForce would buy Heroku? What is the business rationale? "This is Salesforce’s fifth acquisition this year. Earlier purchases include Activa Live, Sitemasher and Jigsaw. Salesforce.com also spent $170 million to fully acquire its Japanese subsidiary, Salesforce Japan." Anyone see a pattern? I don…

Activia Live and Jigsaw relate to Salesforce's core CRM business, Sitemasher and Heroku are both cloud hosting platforms.

Salesforce has been pushing heavily into the cloud to compete with AWS and Azure (see their recent Database.com announcement), these acquisitions give them a strong position in the market.

Heroku in the past has said they plan to offer multiple cloud backends, so it wouldn't surprise me if that's how they got talking to Salesforce.

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#38

Post by notahacker »

hopeless wrote: post #28

This sounds like stellar news for Heroku employees and investors. I'm not sure how it's going to be good for Heroku customers (like me) in the long-term. There will be the inevitable brain drain over the course of 1-2years when key staff move away as their contract clauses run out and then we'll be left with Heroku being run by SalesForce :(

Gotta agree with this assessment.

I've found deployment to Heroku whilst tinkering with side projects fantastic, whilst Salesforce is the bane of my life in the day job. And whilst they have the in-house infrastructure to actually reduce Heroku prices, the Salesforce focus on the enterprise market hints that they're more likely to raise them.

Congratulations to the Heroku team though. Is it DropBox's turn next?

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#39

Post by geoffc »

bigiain wrote: post #31
plinkplonk wrote: post #18

This is great news for Heroku and YC (congratulations folks!). That said, does anyone have any insights on why exactly SalesForce would buy Heroku? What is the business rationale? "This is Salesforce’s fifth acquisition this year. Earlier purchases include Activa Live, Sitemasher and Jigsaw. Salesforce.com also spent $170 million to fully acquire its Japanese subsidiary, Salesforce Japan." Anyone see a pattern? I don…

I wonder how much its just Mark poking Larry with a stick. "So you bought Java, eh? Who cares? I don't need to rely on Java, I've got all the cool kids and their RoR apps!" (212M is an expensive stick though...)

RoR for dynamic HTML apps used to be the coolest thing but now the really new/cool stuff is written as a JSON server talking to AJAX and mobile clients. In this world node.js, clojure and erlang (maybe) are cooler than RoR.
Post reply on HN