Salesforce acquired Heroku in 2010, spending $212 million on the cloud computing outfit. But since then, the two have operated all but independently, with little integration between the Heroku cloud service and the rest of the Salesforce empire.
On Tuesday, this began to change. At its annual user conference in San Francisco, Salesforce unveiled Heroku1, a tool that plugs the Heroku cloud service -- a means of building and deploying online applications -- into the company's flagship business services. The idea is to make it easier for Heroku-based applications to access all the business data stored on Salesforce. "We want to make every Heroku developer a great Salesforce app without having to learn anything new," says Heroku vice president of product Adam Gross.
Heroku offers what's known as platform-as-a-service. Basically, it's an online tool that lets you build and deploy large online applications without having to worry about the hardware and software infrastructure that keeps them going. Salesforce also runs Force.com, a visual tool for creating and integrating applications on the Salesforce platform, but the Heroku service is something that's far more attractive to hardcore software developers.
After the acquisition, Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian became the vice president of platform for Salesforce.com. But when Sebastian left the company last year, Salesforce named Tod Nielsen as the new CEO of Heroku but left the VP of platform position unfilled, raising questions about the future of the cloud service.
The future became a bit more clear at this week's Dreamforce conference. Heroku1 is part of Salesforce 1, an initiative to overhaul the company's various development platforms by bringing them under a common brand and building links between them. The heart of Heroku1 is a tool called Heroku Connect, a new service that syncs data from Salesforce applications with Heroku's PostgreSQL database service. "It's a little like a Dropbox for enterprise data," says Gross.
Gross just joined Heroku from CloudConnect, a company acquired by Salesforce this week, and the rest of the CloudConnect team is working on Heroku1 as well.
Heroku is also rolling out a new set of code libraries for connecting Salesforce services with the Node.js and Ruby on Rails programming platforms, and it's offering a tool called Force.com CLI that bridges the gap between the Heroku service and Salesforce's Force.com web-based application development environment.
Meanwhile, Salesforce has been working on some sort of major project involving PostgreSQL, an increasingly popular open source alternative to Oracle's flagship database product. The company has gone so far as to hire Tom Lane, one of the core developers of the database, but it's unclear what this project involves or how it relates to Heroku.
Heroku chief marketing officer Matt Trifiro says he can't comment on whether Heroku Connect is part of Saleforce's big PostgreSQL project, saying only that Connect is the primary link between Salesforce and Heroku.
