Salesforce picks up Ruby on Rails web-app provider Heroku for $212M

Salesforce announced today that it has acquired Heroku, which develops and deploys web-based applications that rely on the programming language Ruby on Rails, for $212 million as part of its Cloud 2 suite of cloud applications. The company made the announcement at the Dreamforce 2010 conference in San Francisco.

Heroku helps developers streamline their Ruby on Rails web-based applications. Once a developer builds their app, they can launch it on Heroku, which then adjusts things like computing capacity and storage as needed. The community has more than 1 million developers and around 105,000 applications. Last fall, it started integrating with other services. For example, a company could launch their application on Heroku and then monitor it using services from another Rails startup, New Relic.

The company also recently raised a round of funding worth $10 million in May and has raised $15 million total after it was incubated by Y Combinator. The round was led by Ignition Partners, with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Baseline Ventures, and Harrison Metal Capital.

It’s a pretty sizable exit for a company that was founded in 2007, and another testament to how important cloud computing has become for a public company like Salesforce to pay out more than $200 million. It’s also another indication of a shift in Salesforce’s strategy to focus more on developers, as Heroku specializes in removing headaches for developers working with Ruby on Rails. Salesforce already works with VMforce, which similarly helps Java developers run their applications natively on Salesforce’s cloud application environment Force.com.