Salesforce and Heroku are two services that one has probably heard about at least once. It is one of the most loved services helping businesses deliver and scale, and rightly so.
Heroku was founded by Orion Henry, James Lindenbaum, and Adam Wiggins in 2007. Heroku launched commercially with support for Ruby in April, 2009. Eventually Heroku got acquired by Salesforce in 2011 and is now part of the Salesforce Platform which has helped Salesforce offer a full experience where CRM data and functioning apps can come together.
The use of Heroku for any business brings about a wide range of opportunities, which ranges from better performance of applications, managed servers, hardware or infrastructure, ability to scale & serve an increasing number of customers without a hitch, integration with Salesforce to build a complete application and many more.
What is Heroku?
So what exactly is Heroku you may ask? Simply defined, Heroku is a Platform as a service. Heroku provides a cloud based container service that developers can use to deploy, manage and scale a business application.
That means once you have your app as an idea or an MVP, you can leverage the services provided by Heroku to take care of every aspect you may think you would require to run it as a business. From the infrastructure to networking, storage, monitoring and added CRM data accessibility with Salesforce, it can be used to provide a seamless experience for starting out a business or scaling one. This is what sets Heroku apart from its peers and allows you to help developers focus on the core business.
How Can Heroku Benefit My Business?
As we have talked about how wonderful Heroku is and how it can increase developer productivity, Heroku can present a lot of success stories and client testimonies that vouches for how simpler and straightforward their business workflows have become after the use of Heroku. With more than 9 million apps running in the Heroku platform, one might want to learn more about the ease and service Heroku offers.
Data Management
Heroku provides efficient data management capabilities with its three managed and fully scalable data services of Heroku Postgres, Heroku Redis and Apache Kafka on Heroku to all customers. In addition, Heroku Connect is also available for Heroku Enterprise customers which is used for Salesforce data synchronisation.
If these are not the data solution of your choice, it also provides add-ons from third-party data services in its marketplace.
With all these options to use data of all forms, it eliminates the need to invest time and resources to build data storage infrastructures from scratch. Also, since these are managed services, one does not have to worry and work on optimising their performance.
Scale & Enterprise
Scaling an application and trying to provide top notch service with the rapid growth of business can be pretty challenging. But when you are using Heroku, scaling any application of any unprecedented size is an ease.
Everything from the infrastructure you use, to databases and monitoring services are configurable with little effort. Hence, any and every service you use with Heroku, can grow along with your business requirements with a click of a button and help scale your app to be accessible to any number of customers. In addition, you can also configure your application services to autoscale when usage is higher and then downscale as per your configuration helping you to efficiently manage cost as well.
As for the performance challenges that can present with a scaled application, Heroku provides an array of advanced features that can be quickly configured to achieve an improved performance. And all this can be effectively identified and communicated with the reliable monitoring services Heroku provides.
Salesforce Integration
Salesforce is a leader in the CRM front and integrating Salesforce with Heroku equips businesses with a powerful tool to advance their business to greater heights.
Having Heroku fully integrated as part of the Salesforce platform means all the CRM data can be directly accessible to use in the customer facing services in a secure manner minus the complications and risks it may bring when it is not Heroku. This helps create a good feedback loop with the customer insights with the availability of automatic sync of data between your custom application and Salesforce in both directions. Integrating Salesforce with Heroku helps streamline CRM management with confidence.
The Heroku Service Ecosystem
The Heroku Service Ecosystem is well balanced and provides plenty of options to help customise your application as per your needs. As of now, there are over 200 Heroku Add-ons to choose from in the Elements Marketplace and they regularly keep on adding more. This is a one-click install from the Heroku Dashboard and then the add-on can be managed from either the Heroku Dashboard or CLI. Varieties of add-ons with different purposes ranging from alerts and notifications, caching, document processing, email/SMS, video processing and many more are available in the Marketplace.
This means that you can find everything you need to speed up your development cycle and make your team more efficient while working on to customise the application to suit your business without much hassle and investment of a lot of resources. This is a complete package of efficiency in terms of cost, time and resources benefitting any business that chooses to join the ecosystem.
How Can I Integrate Heroku Into My Business?
Whether you are looking to convert an idea into a business or looking to improve your application to match the growth of your business, using Heroku for your application would be the approach. While building your custom application with Salesforce Heroku, you can manage your data better, ensure that your application scales along with your business, integrate Salesforce for a complete CRM experience cycle or leverage the rich Heroku service ecosystem to build reliable custom application.
