Just over two years ago, Heroku was acquired. I was around and peripheral to this just before the acquisition and came on board only barely after. While there is a large group of people that have been there longer than I have (several for 4+ years) I’m still commonly asked how things have changed, how things work, and other questions of that nature. I wrote about some of these processes over a year ago in the months after joining Heroku around our hiring, our teams, and how we work. Many of these things haven’t changed, and yet almost always at a conference I’m asked how are things different since being acquired.

Here’s my personal take (and while I don’t typically include this – to be safe, this is not an official Heroku view of what’s changed).

Are things different since the acquisition?

Heroku in many ways operates like a wholly owned subsidiary or as an independent business within Salesforce. We still have our own office space, our own IT (if you can even call it that), and in general entirely own workflow. I have a salesforce email account that automatically forwards to my Heroku google apps account, and that’s about as much as I know about it. In fact, we’re currently preparing for our new office and its planned to be our home for somewhere between the next 5-10 years.

At the same time some things do flow through Salesforce, some of those things are logistical some strategic. First the perhaps most unfortunate part – hiring. This has not really changed how we hire, but rather once you are coming on board theres more paperwork. In general this is the most painful part that instead of 1/2 pieces of paper theres a few to sign. At the same time some of these come with some greater gains such as benefit, etc. To be honest I dont fully recall what all of the paper work is, but either way there is a bit more of it. The other area we really see this effect is expense accounts. All expenses flow through concur, which in my opinion is a pretty good solution. I’ve used many worse expense solutions and seen few if any better.

Do they influence the product?

Not really

In general we at Heroku aim to have some broader alignment around what we’re trying to accomplish. Salesforce believes in helping their customers become a customer company. We believe that developers are worth of great experiences. Salesforce believes in ensuring its customers are successful. Heroku believes that developers should focus on adding value of their customers not just keeping the lights on. In all of these things its important to have alignment. Not for the company we’re building for the next six weeks or six months, but for the next six years. Given both Salesforce’s and Heroku’s worldview I believe what we’re trying to accomplish is in good alignment.

But does Salesforce influence our product roadmap? No, we aim to listen to our customers problems and build to solve those problems and through that improve the way software is delivered. At the time Salesforce acquired us, the pieces of Cedar were already in motion; including Procfile support, logplex, and other pieces. Later was fully productized Cedar and which was a goal we’d long had – making other languages such as Node, Java, and Python available. This wasn’t driven because Salesforce wanted Java, but because we saw value in delivering the same value of the platform to other communities.

Have we changed?

Sure, we’ve changed, but I’d surmise very little if at all due to Salesforce. We’ve grown from a 20 person company to now over 100. We were a primarily local team and now have people all over. Company offsites get a bit harder to coordinate with 100 people, and finding a date that absoluely everyone can make it is nearly impossible. Many of our changes are more strictly a change of growth than they are because of Salesforce.

I dont get it, why acquire you then?

Because we’re aligned in a much bigger vision, we can both work together long term to accomplish our goal.

The internet is changing the world; software is everywhere.

I believe Salesforce truly understands this. Heroku does as well (though, at the time of the acquisition I fully suspect many Herokai held their breath to see how it would all go). Six weeks went by without trying to ‘change us’, then six months, and here we are over two years later. In many ways so many of us have started to better understand that Salesforce truly understands the above.

If you understand the above, then you know that delivering software and improving that process gives any business a competitive advantage. This is at the core of the value we aim to provide. E.g. If you ranked all companies in terms of how strong they aligned with Heroku, Salesforce might be at the very top.