Salesforce.com Marries Salesforce1 to Heroku Cloud Apps

Data Center Applications and the Cloud: What You Need to Know

While Salesforce.com may be best known for delivering customer relationship management (CRM) software as a service, it also operates a Heroku cloud that is gaining a significant amount of momentum in terms of the number of applications running on that platform.

Starting today, Salesforce.com is moving to more tightly integrate the Salesforce 1 application platform with those applications. The company today announced Salesforce1 Heroku Connect, a synchronization capability that is designed to integrate data flows between the database that Salesforce.com uses to drive its CRM services and the Postgres database used by applications running on Heroku.

Adam Gross, vice president of products for Heroku, says the end goal is to allow organizations that deploy applications on Heroku to more easily take advantage of the customer data stored in Salesforce1 to create workflows that span the enterprise. Instead of each application having to track all the customer data, the Salesforce1 application becomes an integral backend resource for applications running on Heroku.

Beyond simply integrating application programming interfaces (APIs), Gross says Salesforce1 Heroku Connect integrates applications at a database level, which makes it easier to develop and manage workflows across multiple applications in the cloud.

There’s no doubt that Salesforce is aiming to become one of the dominant providers of cloud computing platforms. So far, most of that effort has been focused on attracting developers to its Heroku platform. But with the ability to synchronize data flows between Salesforce1 and Heroku applications, it’s clear that Salesforce is finally gearing up to play the CRM card in the battle for control of the cloud in the enterprise.