SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 02/23/10 -- Heroku, the industry's leading Ruby cloud platform-as-a-service provider, is celebrating the 50,000th web app running on its increasingly popular Cloud PaaS. Heroku's increased traction among cloud applications and developers is a sign that cloud application platforms are providing huge value in the automation of application operation and underscores the industry trend towards supporting new architectures for modern web applications.

"We are seeing a significant groundswell among enterprise developers shifting to newer, better ways of building modern web applications by taking advantage of our cloud application platform and related cloud technologies," said Byron Sebastian, CEO of Heroku. "Being at the center of this new paradigm -- where building highly performant, dynamic, real-time applications is the norm as opposed to settling for more traditional and typically high-latency, low-interaction web apps -- is a really exciting place to be."

Characteristics of these applications include much more effective use of caching, integration of asynchronous programming patterns into standard web app architectures, and alternatives to traditional relational databases. In a survey of over 400 Heroku developers, 88% reported that 'in-memory caching' of data via Memcached was a 'critical' feature and 85+% expressed a strong bias towards architectures that support background workers and messaging technologies. CEO Sebastian added that a "stunning 60% reported to be 'seriously considering' NoSQL data persistence strategies."

Key findings include:

-- 'Must-have' features in a PaaS that respondents are clamoring for include asynchronous workers and Memcached. These capabilities are neck-in-neck in importance and were requested by respondents forty-five (45%) and forty-four (44%) percent, respectively. 'Nice to have' features included iPhone Push Notification with forty-nine (49%) and full text search with forty-six percent (46%).

-- Why use a cloud platform-as-a-service? Eighty-one (81%) percent pointed to 'Agility and Ease of Use' as driving their adoption of cloud technologies. Seventy-one (71%) percent pointed to scaling capabilities, sixty-eight (68%) percent are seeking less management and additional automation capabilities, and sixty-three (63%) percent said they would use the cloud to manage and maintain application 'stacks' or platforms. Fifty-nine (59%) percent cited cost savings.

-- Over eighty-eight percent (88%) of survey respondents reported they are actively using Heroku, with more than sixty percent (60%) of these same users reporting they are using the Heroku platform for business.

More details are available: http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/2/23/winter_2009_survey_results/.

Since 2007, Heroku has set the standard for web app development with a reliable, agile platform for rapid and trusted development, testing, and production deployment of web apps. Heroku's Ruby cloud application platform provides provisionless, automated access to and management of key application platform components such as the Ruby runtime, Rack middleware, SQL databases, background processing, message queuing, in-memory caching, HTTP caching, and many other key architectural app components.

For more information about Heroku, please visit http://heroku.com.

About Heroku

Heroku is a leading provider of cloud computing, offering a Ruby platform-as-a-service focused on ease of use, automation, and reliability. The San Francisco, CA-based company is a passionate and active supporter of Ruby technologies and cloud architecture. Tens of thousands of developers worldwide have deployed over 50,000 applications to Heroku. For more information, please visit http://heroku.com and http://blog.heroku.com or follow Heroku on Twitter at http://twitter.com/heroku.

Heroku disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.

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