But I do believe its commitment to the Ruby programming language and the multitenant programming approach, demonstrated through its Heroku acquisition over the week-end, is something to be taken seriously.

Heroku has only 30 employees, but was launched three years ago with a big idea: to change the way developers think about PaaS. It incorporates Ruby to deliver a multitenant approach that eliminates the need for virtual machines. Kick that thinking up to a higher level, ie to the enterprise buyer level, it means that companies can adapt public-cloud solutions with the knowledge that their data can't touch (or be touched by) anyone else's data.

There are certainly technical arguments to be made in an attempt to render this a non-issue, and multitenant development is more complex than single-tenant (aka multi-instance). But the marketing argument will trump the technical argument in the end, I believe. Salesforce is already talking about Heroku as delivering a "Cloud 2" platform; whether this particular argument sticks or not, this general message will win.

The Ruby community must be happy, too. The language made its first notable appearance during Ajax-mania a few years ago, but with a major announcement such as this of its potential for Cloud, the sky's the limit.