Salesforce ties Heroku Connect with Force.com, eyes mobile dev bundle

Salesforce.com on Tuesday made its Heroku Connect service generally available and moved to integrate it with the Force.com platform to better enable customer facing mobile applications.

The move is aimed at giving mobile developers and enterprise a one-stop shop for building applications. Heroku has been geared more toward startups and smaller dev shops while Force.com holds the data belong to larger enterprises. By combining the two, Salesforce is hoping to enable more "transformational apps," said Scott Holden, vice president of product marketing at Salesforce.

Officially, the connected app package is called Salesforce1 Heroku Connect. Here are the parts:

Ultimately, Salesforce is trying to tie mobile development with the business processes and data in the background. If successful, Holden said most enterprises in the middle between startups and giant enterprises with a lot of resources would be able to improve customer interactions. "Startups have been reinventing the experience for the end user," said Holden. "Why should they have the most fun?"

As a side benefit, Salesforce could cross pollinate two customer bases. Salesforce didn't disclose what percentage of Heroku customers overlap with Force.com. Heroku Connect and Force.com integration was previewed last year at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's annual customer powwow, and has been in beta. 

Holden said that the Heroku-Force.com connection is likely to enable better engagement for loyalty, shopping and connected product apps. "Customer engagement can happen in all types of forms," said Holden.