Why the Heroku news doesn’t change our roadmap
Recently, the news broke that Salesforce is ending new enterprise sales for Heroku. As someone who has been on the platform since the early days, I watched my LinkedIn post on the subject hit over 100,000 impressions within days. It is clear that this is a major concern for the ecosystem.
But if you are a StoreConnect customer, I have one message for you: your service is secure.
We were already building Plan B
While this announcement felt like a shock to the market, we have been preparing for this moment for over a year. About eighteen months ago, I noticed a lack of investment in the Heroku platform. While they eventually brought in a new CTO and a wave of talented engineers, the writing was on the wall.
I made the decision to kick off a development task to look at how we could replace our Heroku dependency completely. I have spent six figures on this project. While it annoyed me to spend that capital, I am now very glad I did. We are well advanced down that line.
If Salesforce decided to stop supporting the platform entirely in four years, we already have the alternative hosting platform ready to go. We were thinking ahead to make sure you wouldn’t have a problem.
The “End of Sale” is not an “End of Life”
It is important to understand what is actually happening. Salesforce has stopped the enterprise “skew” for Heroku, which means the dedicated enterprise sales team is moving on. However, the platform is not going away tomorrow. Trailhead runs on Heroku. Data Cloud runs on Heroku.
Salesforce is very good at one thing: they do not turn off features that clients depend on rapidly. There are objects and fields in the core system today that likely embarrass the product managers who built them, yet they persist because trillions of dollars have been invested in them. We have a massive runway.
Why Heroku is not the reason StoreConnect works
I told a group of Salesforce AEs recently that Heroku is not the secret sauce of our company. StoreConnect works because of two specific architectural decisions we made years ago:
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Salesforce is the 100% source of truth. This means we do not store your core data in a third-party silo.
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We depend on core objects and so we build on the foundation of Sales Cloud.
Because of those two choices, our front end can run anywhere. Whether we host on Heroku, Amazon, GCP or a private server in Brussels, the “Native Navigator” experience remains the same.
The shifting tide of Enterprise Tech
In the early days, Heroku was revolutionary. It set the standard for the ‘git push to deploy’ workflow that every cloud platform has since tried to copy. Its promise was simple: “We take care of the stack.”
But times have changed. Enterprise customers now want to twiddle and tweak every aspect of their build. They want flexibility, reliability and low maintenance costs. Managed services that Heroku once charged a premium for are now being handled by automated systems at a fraction of the cost.
Looking ahead
Our commitment to providing a stable and performant platform has never been stronger. This news simply reinforces the importance of the infrastructure investments we have been making.
If you are a Heroku Enterprise customer feeling stranded, I recommend reaching out to reinteractive. They are specialists in these migrations and can help you navigate the transition.
For our StoreConnect partners and customers, it is business as usual. We have already done the heavy lifting so you can focus on your mission.
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