Apps are an essential part of the Internet of Customers. They are the dashboards to people’s lives. They allow your customers to be part of your business’ workflows, and for you to engage with them on an unprecedented level. Customer connected apps are the next phase of how companies are innovating and gaining competitive advantage. 

Today, we are launching Heroku1, a complete service for building and scaling the next generation of customer connected apps. 

Heroku1 is purpose-built for the Salesforce1 platform. It is a new, fully-loaded edition of Heroku’s Platform-as-a-Service designed specifically for building apps that are fully integrated with your Salesforce data. Because it leverages your existing investment in Salesforce.com, it’s now faster and easier than ever to build web, mobile, and connected-device apps that will delight your customers.

Heroku1 solves the three biggest problems that enterprises face in building connected applications:

1. Connected data: Too many web and mobile applications are islands, and don’t connect with core customer and operational information.
2. Speed to market: Managing infrastructure and using clumsy tools makes it hard to get apps to market fast.
3. Ongoing operations: The hardest part of having successful apps isn’t building them, it is managing them.

Heroku is already used by thousands of startups and cutting-edge enterprises. It runs some of the largest and most innovative apps on the Internet, including Paper by FiftyThree, Automatic, Urban Dictionary, Lyft, and Asics. Heroku1 makes the power of Heroku available to companies that have embraced the Salesforce1 Platform.

Customers Apps Done Right with Heroku Connect

The cornerstone of Heroku1 is the new Heroku Connect technology, which leverages your Salesforce investment by giving your developers a simple and efficient way to connect all your customer-facing Heroku apps to your Salesforce environment. 

Heroku Connect:

• Automatically synchronizes your Heroku Postgres database with your customer and operational data in Salesforce.
• Provides your Force.com data in a SQL database, which is compatible with all leading web and mobile app dev environments, such as Ruby, Java, Node.js and PHP.
• Seamlessly scales to handle even the most demanding traffic levels.

Now your customer-facing apps can be responsive to your business workflows. For example, your marketing team can prepare offers within Salesforce and have those offers automatically presented to customers inside your app. And the connection is two-way, so data that your customers provide by using your app is synced back to Salesforce records automatically, making it easy to take actions and create dashboards based on how your customers use your app.

Better Apps with the Cloud

Heroku1 lets your software developers focus on building great experiences for your customers, not on managing infrastructure. Heroku1 removes the need to requisition, setup, and manage servers. This allows developers to focus on what they do best: Delivering better apps faster.

Heroku1 supports the most popular programming languages in use today, including Java, Ruby, Node.js, PHP, and Python. This means developers can choose the best tool for the job, delivering better software faster.

Sleep at Night, While we Manage Ongoing Operations

You know that launching an app is just the first step. After it’s live, you need to scale, monitor, and operate it. Heroku1 is a platform as a service, so app operations are built-in. We have a team of engineers who monitor your app to keep it up and running smoothly. Security updates and patches are handled automatically. And scaling is as simple as a single click to provision more resources.

Innovate with Heroku1

Are you ready to innovate? Heroku1 is in limited availability today to charter customers, and will be generally available in the first half of 2014. If you want to learn more about Heroku1, apply to be a charter customer, or be notified when it is generally available, please visit www.heroku.com/1.

Demo Salesforce1 at the button below.