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Comment by njudah | Hacker News Reader

- Heroku generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue. There are plenty of interesting things to debate about its past and future, but it was not a failure by any reasonable definition.

- Salesforce did ~27b in revenue in 2022; its very hard for a comparatively small business to get resources / mindshare in that environment, especially when you focus on a market / audience that is different than the rest of the business. From a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products - its interested in selling them largely as is to existing customers. Fundamentally its a financial engineering and sales exercise, not a product innovation one. (Not to say I support or think thats the best way of driving growth, but offering my POV on the structural dynamics.)

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> Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products - its interested in selling them largely as is to existing customers

Definitely true, but SF is extremely interested in marketing its unintegrated products as fully integrated.

See for example: SF marketing cloud, where the only integration is an iframe for your SF session and a fresh branded subdomain (mc.exacttarget.com chefs kiss)

Of course, there’s other success metrics than just financials. I think healthy financials are definitely a trailing indicator when it comes to innovation, and that it’s probably fair to say thay Heroku either has or is losing leadership over the future of its niche (PaaS.) I’ve been a vocal fan of Fly.io here; it’s a bit apples and oranges, but it really feels like they finally are fully scratching an itch that Heroku originally made me cognizant of.

That said, having good ideas is nothing if you can’t prove it in the market, but I do think Heroku will be around for a very long time by the nature of how sticky its customers can be, so it’s hard to use that to judge the future.

I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition

Isn't the elephant in the room then; why did Salesforce buy Heroku?

I mean:

> From a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products

> I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition

What was the point of the aquisition? To let it die?

I always thought it was cheaper for them to buy it than to keep paying to use it.

This is an interesting topic :)

After Apex was introduced in 2006, Salesforce suffered criticism (misplaced, IMHO) over the fact that it was proprietary. In 2009 it did a partnership with VMware to create a Java-as-a-service proto-PaaS so business logic could be written in Java instead of Apex. This service (VMforce) never worked for a variety of reasons, leaving Salesforce to look for an alternative -- so in early 2011 they bought Heroku. Thats why the first thing Heroku did post acquisition was build Java support.

Turns out this wasn't a great product idea to start (the limitations of externalizing business logic, especially at that time, weren't worth the effort), so the strategic reason for the acquisition was no longer relevant. Years later there were successful integrations that had different value propositions, although those suffered from the constraints described above.

Salesforce bought Heroku in the early days of the “Salesforce Platform” product era. I wouldn’t be surprised if Heroku tech underpins a big chunk of the AppExchange developer experience.

There might be less than you would think. Salesforce's security review does not take kindly to having executable portions of your managed package live outside of their stringent security process. That isn't too say it doesn't happen. But you have to make a case for it being critical.

> What was the point of the aquisition? To let it die?

I've seen companies who build on Force.com use it for <we need a standalone application that does X because Force.com can't do it or we have teams that don't know Apex but want to do X> and then integrate it against. They have an interesting (albeit not sure if it ever got fully fleshed out) bi-directional DB sync between SFDC and Heroku Postgres, which to me is the killer app for integration.

Do you have a source for the earnings figures? I can’t find anything — Heroku generating hundreds of millions a year feels like something that would be surfaced in the Salesforce financials.

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