Salesforce Finally Melds Itself With the Heroku Cloud

Grazed from Wired. Author: Clint Finley.

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…

Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/heroku1/