Everyone loves a small scrappy startup. But what happens when a startup goes from being an underdog to just a part of a much larger corporation?
Salesforce.com acquired cloud computing startup Heroku for $212 million in 2010, and since then, two of Heroku's three founders have left the company, along with the former CEO. Now, Tod Nielsen -- previously the co-president of Pivotal Labs, the cloud-centric spinoff company of VMware and EMC -- is stepping in to become Heroku's new CEO, the company announced on Wednesday.
He's got a tough job ahead of him. Though Heroku was once the darling of the Silicon Valley developer community, recent shakeups have many questioning its future. "Adam and crew did a tremendous job of getting this started, but moving forward, we need to take advantage of the opportunities that are out there for us," says Nielsen, who, unlike previous CEO Byron Sebastian, will focus solely on Heroku -- and not on Saleforce's other developer service, Force.com.
Nielsen has extensive experience leading companies focused on software development tools for large enterprise companies, having worked for Borland, Microsoft and Oracle. He certainly has the resume of someone who could help Heroku grow-up, but he says the real challenge is in helping Heroku decide what it actually wants to be when it grows up.
Because of Heroku's relationship to Salesforce.com, going after large enterprise customers -- instead individual developers or smaller startups -- may seem like a natural move. "But we have over four million apps already deployed on Heroku, do we just abandon those developers?" he asks.
"We have opportunities in enterprise. We have opportunities in mobile. We have opportunities in the internet of things," he says.
In the years since Heroku's acquisition, cloud computing has gone from being a fringe concept to being central part of doing business in the past few years. Even the CIA is interested in using Amazon's cloud service. Heroku runs a service that sits on top of Amazon's cloud and takes the burden of configuring and maintaining a development environment off of programmers, so that they can focus on writing code. It's what's known as a platform cloud, or platform as a service.
When Heroku was acquired, platform clouds were still fairly novel. Google had AppEngine, and Microsoft had Azure. But since the Heroku acquisition, tech giants like IBM, Oracle, VMware, and many others have entered the sector. Meanwhile, the line between platform clouds and "infrastructure clouds" like Amazon Web Services has started to blur. Amazon, for example, offers a platform-like service called Beanstalk, and both Microsoft and Google have expanded from platform clouds into the infrastructure cloud market.
That adds up to much more competition for Heroku. "At the end of the day, we're not a massively large company," Nielsen says. "We have a large uncle in the form of Salesforce, but we've got to focus to be successful."
He says he's going to be meeting with each Heroku employee one-on-one in the company and over the next month. "Then I'll be able to assess where the company is and get a very clear idea of where to go next," he says.
