Salesforce.com is plowing further into the cloud market recently announced its purchase of  $212 million for Heroku, a cloud platform as a service, (PaaS) for $212 million in cash in an effort to expand into the fast growing social media and mobile space.

M&A has been hot in storage, and now heating back up in cloud infrastructure.  This has been a real boom for tech startups that have been focusing on cloud. I’m expecting more acquisitions in the PaaS startup market.  Specifically companies focused on software or open source frameworks which ease the time and cost to development and deploy of applications.

Cloud infrastructure acquisitions in the software space were unheard of until VMware bought Springsource just over a year ago for $420 million. Since then,  Springsource has been a centerpiece in VMware’s platform strategy that was announced at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco.

Rod Johnson, SVP Cloud Applications Platform for VMware, formerly CEO of Springsource

Heroku, founded in 2007, has been a hot company in the cloud circles for over year now. Heroku hosts applications written in the Ruby programing language, and Ruby has been favored by developers because of the ease of deployment. The success in the market has mainly been driven by the success of the mobile web.

This fortifies Salesforce’s position in the growing developer market around pure cloud and emerging private cloud.  Salesforce is “placing a lot of bets”, as it were, in order to gain a solid foothold in its effort  to dominate the cloud both for public and private. With Heroku, Salesforce wants all the developers in whatever langauage they want to program in.

Just this past April, Salesforce announced a partnership with VMWare, where they teamed up to announce VMforce, an enterprise Java cloud, in an effort to productize general-purpose cloud computing services.

My Angle
Heroku gives Salesforce a big presence with Ruby and new applications developers that previously would have nothing to do with Salesforce.  More importantly, given the other recent announcements from Salesforce, it’s clear that they want to be the “Switzerland” for developers. In order to win the day with developers, the value proposition must be strong. Salesforce has to deliver scale, low cost, ease of deployment, and distribution/monetization.

I’m skeptical about Salesforce, because I’m not sure they have the “juice” in developing an vibrant ecosystem, and VMware’s economics appear much stronger than Salesforce’s. One angle where I think Salesforce could win big with their recent moves is have a strong position in the Stack Wars. What I mean is, that if Salesforce can garner cross platform developers and support any stack, then that’s a winning strategy.

Richard McAniff visits theCUBE to discuss cloud computing and Interface Design