Salesforce.com has agreed to buy Ruby-hosting giant Heroku for $212m in cash.

San Francisco-based Heroku, which was founded in 2007, is home to more than 100,000 Ruby applications, and developers of all sizes use its system, which runs on Amazon’s EC2 with a bespoke simplified management interface twist.

Its eclectic mix of customers include US electronics retail giant Best Buy and the Richard Dawkins Foundation. Additionally, the firm is also considered something of a heavyweight in pushing Web2.0 tech onto the platform-as-a-service table.

"The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2," said Salesforce.com boss Marc Benioff.

"Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fuelling this growing community," Benioff said. "We think this acquisition will uniquely position salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers."

It’s hardly surprising to see Salesforce.com swoop in on Heroku, given its recent release of its own Facebook-like workplace collaboration tool, Chatter.

The buyout, which is subject to the usual regulatory guff, is expected to close by the end of January 2011. ®