This should put a hop in the step of all those Heroku-for-Django startups.
Except that Heroku for Django in the long term is likely to be Heroku (given they've said in the past they plan to expand to other languages).
Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
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Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#72Good work, Heroku!
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought that was Google App Engine?
Google App Engine is similar, but not identical to normal Django.
They give you free-ness up to a rather large number of pageviews/users/whatever, right? Could the process be smoothed to make the workflow as smooth as Heroku makes it, or do the differences in Google's infrastructure make that too much of a pain to automate?
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#74This 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?
>Congratulations to the Heroku team though. Is it DropBox's turn next?
Shut up before you jinx us all.
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"Salesforce has been pushing heavily into the cloud to compete with AWS and Azure" Just five years too late. They should have built AWS way before anybody else (esp Amazon) did. They were sitting on the opportunity for so long, had a customer base that was already sold on the cloud. They are now playing catch-up, with acquisitions and the release of Database.com etc. Huge opportunity missed, the company could have be…
I thought Salesforce's strategy was more to use force.com developers to build apps that add value back to the core Salesforce product. Trying to compete with AWS as a cloud for the masses is kinda pointless in terms of making any profit for your company, isn't it?
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Salesforce has been pushing heavily into the cloud to compete with AWS and Azure" Just five years too late. They should have built AWS way before anybody else (esp Amazon) did. They were sitting on the opportunity for so long, had a customer base that was already sold on the cloud. They are now playing catch-up, with acquisitions and the release of Database.com etc. Huge opportunity missed, the company could have be…
Or more likely distraction from their core CRM business would have made it difficult to compete, Siebel and SAP would have taken their high-end customers and Zoho their low end customers. Stuck between a pincer market move they would have been forced to sell to Oracle for a few hundred million dollars. Salesforce five years wasn't anywhere near enough in the position that they could afford to throw tens of millions o…
"core CRM business"
They started promoting PaaS (term they coined) ~4 years ago and the marketing dropped CRM to focus on Salesforce being a 'cloud expert' (or leader). All of what Benioff has been saying around that time and up to today was Salesforce moving beyond CRM and into being 'cloud' and 'platform'.
I remember him having a slide in one presentation where it showed "CRM ==> Platform ==> PaaS", or something similar, showing Salesforce development and roadmap.
Problem was, for them it meant providing more apps and the app platform and building it themselves, rather than providing the tools to allow developers to build out their platform for them. A bit like Microsoft not having Visual Studio and MSDN.
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think Heroku is not so much about Rails than about Ruby. You can use any rack-based app here, as well as host long-running job workers. In the non-startup enterprises (I work with those), the work is usually to glue things together. Call a legacy web-service here, run a worker there, put things back into a legacy CRM etc. Ruby is perfect for that. JRuby is even better, actually, and I wouldn't be surprised to see H…
Heroku is also planning on rolling out node.js support which will help round them out even further.
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#78Please let the Heroku folks create an interface for Salesforce that doesn't feel like enterprise Java.
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#79I can see EngineYard opening a bottle to celebrate as well, $212M in 'mostly stock' would be landing a big one, to be landing it in cash is very good indeed. Congratulations to everybody, especially to the people that brokered the deal on Herokus side, very impressive. In other news, registrars the world over report a large uptick in domain registrations around the twin themes of rails hosting and sushi...
I can see Linode opening a bottle to celebrate too :)
Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash
#80I'm happy for Heroku that they got such a great deal, but I have to say I'm disappointed by this. Heroku seemed like they were in a great position to do amazing things. I thought they had a solid revenue model. I had hoped Heroku would be the one doing the acquiring.