Salesforce Finally Connects Heroku To Its Cloud
Salesforce finally connected the powerful Heroku cloud application platform to its own database layer on Tuesday with the release of the Heroku Connect tool. The move was promised last year when the company debuted its Salesforce1 mobile app …
Context & Ripple Effects
Salesforce paid $212 million for Heroku back in December 2010 (the cash deal TechCrunch reported), but for three and a half years the PaaS sat beside the CRM empire rather than inside it — the gap the company itself acknowledged when it promised a Heroku connection at last November's Salesforce1 launch. It also bought cloudconnect just before Dreamforce 2013, signaling the same intent on the data side.
Heroku Connect delivers on that promise: Heroku applications can now read and write against Salesforce's own database layer, making the 2010 acquisition functionally part of the Salesforce1 mobile platform rather than an independent asset. The story traveled unusually widely for a developer tool release — pickups at TechCrunch, ZDNet, Gigaom, Computerworld Australia, SD Times and Heroku's own channels all landed the same day.
First-order effects
- Heroku developers gain direct, supported access to Salesforce's database layer without building custom sync plumbing — the core value of the $212 million acquisition finally ships.
- The Salesforce1 platform, launched in November 2013, gets a concrete developer on-ramp: mobile and web apps built on Heroku can now sit natively on Salesforce customer data.
Second-order effects
- Rival PaaS providers now have to answer an integration question — why build on a platform that isn't wired into your company's system of record — as Salesforce converts CRM data gravity into developer lock-in.
- The cloudconnect acquisition points the same direction: Salesforce assembling a data-and-apps stack where each piece (CRM, database layer, PaaS) reinforces the others' pricing power.
Third-order effects
- Enterprise cloud vendors are monetizing earlier infrastructure acquisitions not as standalone products but as glue for platform ecosystems — the test being whether developers pick runtimes by data-layer integration rather than raw capability, a shift that would consolidate PaaS around suite owners like Salesforce.
The trend: Enterprise software platforms are converting past infrastructure acquisitions into integrated data-plus-runtime ecosystems, with CRM data gravity as the anchor.