New Zealand-based development company Trineo began integrating Heroku and Salesforce.com several months ago, long before Salesforce.com announced its acquisition of the Ruby on Rails platform provider.
Independent analyst Ben Kepes writes about Trineo’s experience integrating the two services. His analysis shows how the developer community and the enterprise world are entering a new phase in their relationship.
One of Trineo’s customers stored all its client information in Salesforce.com. The customer wanted to give clients access to its information in Salesforce.com. But the customer didn’t want to buy Salesfore.com licences for every one of its clients. Trineo built a portal using Ruby on Rails and Heroku that allowed clients to access their information. Trineo delivered the proof-of-concept in three days.
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The portal Trineo built has the following features according to Kepes:
- A client can log into a secure customer portal
- A client has a dashboard where they can see information about their jobs and balance
- A client can drill down into their records to find detailed information about their account
- Access to a set of FAQ style documents
Trineo’s developers were able to build the portal so quickly because they were able to base it off an existing Ruby gem.
Kepes also notes that since the portal takes advantage of the Salesforce.com API, very little data had to actually be stored on Heroku.
Based on our poll it appears that some developers are meeting the Heroku acquisition with skepticism. Developers aren’t sure they want to develop on a Saleforce.com-owned platform. Trineo’s experience shows that Heroku is a natural fit for Salesforce.com, at least from an enterprise development perspective. Kepes closes with following thought:
I spent a lot of time at DreamForce talking about the perceived divide between what is traditionally seen as development (think sandals, red bull, foosball and a consumer-centric approach) and enterprise (think collar and tie, slow and klunky). Once the Heroku deal was announced I prognosticated that we were seeing the first steps to build a bridge across that not insignificant chasm – examples like the one above show the power of light and nimble meeting the enterprise – what salesforce does with it’s new acquisition will be very interesting to watch.
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