Salesforce and Heroku
13 April 2011
Last night, at the Ruby on Rails Oceania (RoRo) meetup in Sydney, some folks from Salesforce.com came to discuss their recent acquisition of Heroku and what it means for developers in Australia.
No one from Heroku came. The Salesforce contingent consisted of two developer/evangelists and a couple of PR people and the main message was:
“Don’t worry, nothing will change. Everything will be fine”.
There were a lot of new faces in the crowd. Most identified themselves as being from The Enterprise. There were a lot more Thoughtworkers present than usual.
The talks covered some history and future strategy. Salesforce started as a Software as a Service provider but now have their sights set on offering a ‘Platform as a Service’.
As a platform provider the Heroku acquisition made absolute sense. Heroku are the model of PaaS for Ruby and Rails. They’re disrupting the sector, genuinely innovating and have a growing, passionate user base.
Another reason, not explicitly stated, for Salesforce to acquire a company like Heroku could be for its potential influence on The Enterprise.
That may sound strange. Ruby hasn’t really made a significant dent on the stalwart Enterprise platforms like Java and C#/.NET and there’s no real indication that such a thing is even likely in the near future.
But Ruby mind share is growing among developers, who are beginning to use the language and platforms like Heroku in small skunkworks projects within big companies.
An embattled project team can take a couple of Rails developers and build a working application, that business people can actually use within weeks, rather than months or years or never at all.
Forget long requirements phases, forget expensive architects, endless requirements documentation and acceptance testing dances. Just build something, ship it and see if people like it. Rinse, repeat.
Salesforce want a channel into The Enterprise. They want their platform and services hooked into as many big companies as they possibly can. Their revenue, presumably, depends on it.
From a business perspective it seems that Salesforce has been looking to the senior Heroku management to help them build their Platform capability, using Heroku as a model.
Some of that work will be winning over big integrators, as another route to getting Salesforce services into big companies from within the trojan horse of Heroku and Ruby.
If Ruby and Heroku are becoming the go-to technology choice for skunkworks projects in The Enterprise, and if a business can add Salesforce services to their shiny new Rails application via a Heroku add-on, then that seems like a pretty good looking channel.