10 Sep Salesforce Beefs Up Heroku For Custom Enterprise Apps
Salesforce App Cloud ties together Salesforce’s CRM apps, Force.com platform, and Heroku platform to run various parts of an application.
Salesforce offers a variety of ways for customers to extend or customize their Salesforce apps or even build a different app linked to their CRM system. Now it’s trying to pull all its options together into a Salesforce App Cloud.
The App Cloud is a place to build applications, link to existing legacy applications, or integrate data from Salesforce CRM applications. It’s different from Salesforce AppExchange, where hundreds of ready-built apps are on display and available for purchase and use.
The App Cloud provides networking and integration between Salesforce’s proprietary platform, Force.com where its proprietary language, Apex, is a major offering, and Heroku Enterprise. Heroku is a vendor-neutral cloud service for developers that Salesforce acquired in 2010. Salesforce launched Heroku Enterprise in February as a more protected form of infrastructure to make Heroku more attractive to IT managers.
Heroku is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offered on top of Amazon Web Services and hence is a service in a multi-tenant environment. By the end of the year, Heroku Enterprise will include a Private Spaces offering that’s easier for Salesforce customers to set up than Amazon’s plain-vanilla Virtual Private Cloud service.
It will be generally available in early 2016. Pricing on new Heroku Enterprise services, such as Private Spaces, will be announced upon general availability.
Heroku will give IT managers the option of commissioning a Private Space for an application on a virtual server that’s tied to other applications and outside resources via a virtual private network. It’s still multi-tenant infrastructure, but a Heroku Enterprise workload will be connected to Force.com via an encrypted, bidirectional line that can engage in data syncing.
A developer will be able to run an app in a Private Space with “direct access to Salesforce’s trusted infrastructure” and CRM applications, said Jim Sinai, senior director of platform product marketing at Salesforce. “In the same way that Heroku has made Amazon simple and easy to use for developers, Private Spaces will make it easy to use for IT managers,” he claimed.
Single-sign-on enables users to sign onto their Salesforce account and use a Salesforce CRM application, the Force.com platform, or Heroku Enterprise tools and platform. Role-based access controls govern what the user can do after sign-on.