It’s no secret that mobile apps are upending entire industries.

Apps like Uber and Spotify are taking a large bite out of the customer base from taxi companies and record labels that were previously unassailable.

While apps are clearly the future, why aren’t more enterprises delivering mobile apps to delight and retain their customers?

Where Are Enterprise Customer Apps?

The best customer-facing apps bring together two essential elements: customer engagement and business process. Unfortunately, the technologies designed to support customer engagement and those used to power business processes have traditionally been built on separate platforms.

Companies have spent decades building employee apps focused on efficiency, reporting, and compliance. Now they are finding that these internal systems don’t integrate with the modern tools designed for customer engagement. These new tools often feature open software stacks that allow for modern programming languages, rapid iteration, and easy scalability, reaching millions of users.

Connecting Two Critical Elements

Until now only two types of companies have succeeded at combining engagement technology and business process technology:

• Startups - By hiring the best developers to build out their systems from scratch, startups like Uber and Square have been able to marry customer engagement with business process.

• Fortune 100 - With deep pockets and armies of IT consultants, large Fortune 100 companies have managed to connect their legacy enterprise systems with engaging customer apps. Think Starbucks for iPhone, a customer loyalty app that is accepted as payment at thousands of stores globally, or Chase Mobile, which allows customers to instantly deposit checks through the camera on their mobile phones.

Customer Apps For Every Enterprise

How can the rest of the business world build connected customer apps without starting new companies or hiring massive IT consulting armies? This week salesforce.com is launching Heroku Connect to give every company the necessary tools to build engaging customer apps that connect to business process. Heroku Connect seamlessly integrates two core components of the Salesforce1 Platform:

• Heroku - Developer-friendly tools to help companies build engaging customer-facing apps on modern cloud technology.

• Force.com - The world’s #1 tool for building powerful business process apps for employees.

Businesses are no longer forced to choose between modern development tools and trusted enterprise technology. Heroku Connect brings together engagement and enterprise technology in a single platform.

To learn more about building customer apps with Heroku Connect and the Salesforce1 Platform click here.

Read this e-book for tips on how to build incredible mobile experiences for your customers.