What's your thinking on Heroku's acquisition by Salesforce?

rubyonrails-talk
1

So I've been keeping an eye on the recent acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce.com, and truth be told, I'm pretty concerned. I've been developing an app recently that I had planned to launch on Heroku, before I heard about this merger. But now that Salesforce.com is about to finish the acquisition of Heroku, I'm not so sure that's a good idea.

But the question I have is: what do you think?

I fully concede that I could be over-paranoid here. It's happened before and I'm sure it'll happen again. But in a world where we see large IT companies gobbling up everything in sight (Oracle, Google, Apple, Microsoft) as a strategy to limit competition and force vendor lock-in, as well as with what Oracle's done with MySQL (and what it's obvious they plan to do - make it crippled and pointless over time, forcing people to buy Oracle and effectively killing an open source database competitor), it would be foolish for me not to at least consider what Salesforce.com's future strategy is for Heroku.

Not only that, but in my opinion, these days, CEO's are every bit as "dodgy" and untrustworthy as politicians. I don't believe a word they're saying. Just because CEO X says something today doesn't mean that's what'll actually happen three months down the line.

So I'm curious - what do you guys think? Am I over-paranoid here, thinking that SF is basically going to try to "pull an Oracle" on Heroku (jacking up the price, killing the service's usefulness, etc.), or do you think that SF is a "good steward" of something like Heroku?

My biggest concern is launching my app on Heroku, only to find that SF jacks up the prices, or starts charging differently for various components that would make the application take a nose-dive in terms of profitability or cost-effective scalability. Not only that, but I'm concerned that if the do these things, I may have some difficulty later getting access to my data so I can move the application somewhere else (i.e. vendor lock-in).

Am I being paranoid, or are these concerns well founded?

2

..you're not happy with the price/T&Cs/whatever? Then move the app to another provider. It's not a big deal.

3

Well, Hassan, that's just it. If I launch the application now, let it build up a solid user base over the next 6 months to a year, and then SF screws something up, now I have a database potentially several gigabytes in size that I have to move from Heroku to Engine Yard or some other place. That is kind of a big deal. While it's simple in theory, I'm not sure I trust SF to avoid trying to prevent me from accessing my own database/data and/or doing some form of a SQL dump to export it all elsewhere.

My question to the community is: do you trust Salesforce.com not to screw up the platform or introduce additional financial, technological or procedural burdens on customers?

4

..you're not happy with the price/T&Cs/whatever? Then move the app to another provider. It's not a big deal.

Well, Hassan, that's just it. If I launch the application now, let it build up a solid user base over the next 6 months to a year, and then SF screws something up, now I have a database potentially several gigabytes in size that I have to move from Heroku to Engine Yard or some other place. That is kind of a big deal. While it's simple in theory, I'm not sure I trust SF to avoid trying to prevent me from accessing my own database/data and/or doing some form of a SQL dump to export it all elsewhere.

You should not be trusting Heroku to backup your database anyway. Suppose the company ceased trading suddenly for some reason, your data might become inaccessible. Alternatively some act of <insert Deity

or malicious individuals might cause havoc. It is essential that

you have your own backup so you do not loose everything.

My question to the community is: do you trust Salesforce.com not to screw up the platform or introduce additional financial, technological or procedural burdens on customers?

You can never trust any company to do more than the immediate contract requires, and even then, as I pointed out above, a company may cease trading and then all bets are off.

Colin

5

You should not be trusting Heroku to backup your database anyway.

Agreed; keeping a running backup of a live DB is always a good idea, and Heroku makes that easy enough.

My question to the community is: do you trust Salesforce.com not to screw up the platform or introduce additional financial, technological or procedural burdens on customers?

I would *expect* (not trust) them to honor their contractual obligations -- have you and/or your attorney gone over the contract thoroughly? Do you know what they're agreeing to provide *right now*? :slight_smile:

I'm only using Heroku for development sites right now so I haven't, but if I were planning to go to production on their platform I certainly would.

And as Colin says -- stuff happens. Companies go out of business, change business models, experience catastrophic failures -- being prepared to switch to another provider if necessary is always a good idea. Run a backup system on another provider's cloud; without any traffic it'll cost you almost nothing, but if you need it -- a DNS change and some propagation time and you're back in business.

FWIW,