by Kerry Watt 
Our very own Salesforce consultant, Kerry Watt, tells us about her introduction to Heroku and how it could help transform your business.
I recently attended a Partner event at the Salesforce tower, the subject – Heroku. “Well that name certainly doesn’t give anything away” I thought! Intrigued, I armed myself with a pen and pad and spent the next 2 hours listening intently to the capabilities of this product. I left the event filled with new and exciting information about another great Salesforce product and with this newfound knowledge, it made me reflect on a previous company I worked for where I was required to manage both in-house and outsourced developers. In this role, I quickly learnt the challenges which one faces when managing a developer platform and all its infrastructure (servers, middleware, O/S) as well as the cost burden it has on a business. “If only I had Heroku” I now thought.
So what is Heroku? Well it is a cloud-based platform that lets companies build, deliver, monitor and scale apps fast. App developers can spend their time on their application code rather than managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations or scaling. It effectively reduces cloud operations overhead by letting Salesforce manage your platform for you. So all those elements I had to worry about before in my previous role, it would have managed for me – genius! Heroku takes all of these challenges away and in Salesforce’s own words – It’s the fastest way to go from idea to URL, bypassing all those infrastructure headaches.
The benefit of Heroku is huge and the result of using it means an increase in developer productivity (by an average of 30%). For a business, it also reduces operational costs with no underlying infrastructure to manage and you can build apps in any modern language whilst leveraging an ecosystem of over 150 add-ons. Sound too good to be true? During this session I witnessed just how quick it was to build and deploy an app; is it any wonder companies from startups to Fortune 500 use Heroku?
If you would like to find out more on how Heroku can help you increase your developer productivity, deliver apps back to the business faster and take away those infrastructure headaches, then feel free to get in touch.