Salesforce.com has chosen to spend a lot of money on the acquisition of Heroku and many may question whether it will turn out to be a financially astute decision by Marc Benioff's firm.
During a lunch briefing at the Dreamforce 2010 conference in San Francisco, IT PRO caught up with co-founder of Heroku, James Lindenbaum, who was certainly delighted with the deal.
Interestingly, the plan was "to not change anything," Lindenbaum said, with the same team members, location and concept to be maintained.
"We have a great roadmap we're excited about and a plan to move forward on that," he added.
"These guys [Salesforce.com] are very, very clear that they don't want to interfere with that roadmap."
Even Heroku's aggressive expansion plans would not change. So, if Salesforce.com is going to stay away from interfering with Heroku's activities, why did it place such a significant amount of money on the table?
Eric Knipp, senior research analyst at Gartner, was also present at the lunch and, having watched the rise of Heroku in the past few years, took a particular interest in the deal.
He agreed with Benioff the Heroku technology was genuinely impressive, telling IT PRO the intellectual property was truly "cutting edge."
The Ruby language also appeared to be attracting a good deal of interest, Knipp said, and there was even potential for the Heroku technology to support other languages in the future.
"It's possible we are right at the beginning of this Ruby wave cresting into the enterprise, in which case Salesforce is in a position to ride it," he added.
However, the cloud company was "making a bet" by putting so much money into the somewhat nascent Ruby language, he added.
As for other challenges that lay ahead for Salesforce.com and its new purchase, Knipp said the company's strategy was becoming broader and yet Benioff stressed earlier in the week the need to remain focused.
"It's getting more and more complex and you have to ask questions," Knipp told IT PRO.
"Will it be hard to maintain the same level of execution when your focus is becoming more fragmented?"
Furthermore, Knipp said the addition to the Salesforce.com lineup would make it harder for the cloud firm to sell to customers, as the collection of products "will be more complex externally," as well as internally.
He also claimed the price tag for Heroku was significant at $212 million (134.3 million).
Knipp said he would be surprised if Heroku had $10 million in revenue, which meant Salesforce.com would have paid around 20 times that figure for its newest acquisition.
"That's a pretty rich price," he added.
