Salesforce Shuts Down Heroku Enterprise Sales for New Customers

Salesforce has retired sales of Heroku enterprise contracts, indicating that the product is now in End of Sale (EOS) for enterprise customers. 

This allegedly comes as a result of Salesforce redirecting its product and engineering investments to areas with better long-term value, including growing AI efforts. 

Heroku’s Journey

After Salesforce acquired Heroku in 2010 as part of a wider effort to expand its cloud services, Heroku became an important part of Salesforce’s navigation through a rapidly shifting SaaS market. 

Since then, Heroku has acted as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) based on a managed container system. It boasts an “integrated data services and a powerful ecosystem for deploying and running modern apps.” 

Over the last couple of years, Heroku seemed to have turned a corner. It expanded into more AI-focused tooling, bringing the AI capabilities of Salesforce to its products and features. Even as recently as last July, Heroku was releasing features meant to provide better services for core Salesforce customers, such as Heroku AppLink.  

No More Enterprise Sales

Salesforce has confirmed that Heroku Enterprise Account contracts will not be available for new customers from today. Existing Enterprise subscriptions and support contracts will continue to be fully honored and may be renewed as usual.

“There is no change for customers using Heroku today,” Salesforce confirmed. “Customers who pay via credit card in the Heroku dashboard – both existing and new – can continue to use Heroku with no changes to pricing, billing, service, or day-to-day usage. Core platform functionality, including applications, pipelines, teams, and add-ons, is unaffected, and customers can continue to rely on Heroku for their production, business-critical workloads.”

Heroku has also confirmed this matter on LinkedIn, stating that an emphasis is placed on “maintaining quality and operational excellence rather than introducing new features.”

Community opinions over the change have already begun to circulate, with StoreConnect CEO and Founder Mikel Lindsaar speaking out on the news.

“This is devastating for the Heroku team. There was a lot of excitement from them last year, and it really felt like things were starting to explode and go in the right direction, but fundamentally, the sales didn’t meet expectations,” he wrote.

Sarah Thanawalla, the co-founder of the Cloud Divas podcast, reiterated the message that current customers were fine.

“’I’m not sure what this means for the Heroku hub, but I am committed to helping the community understand the incredible benefits of this platform and why all companies operating at scale should trust Heroku with their backend needs.”

Summary

This move from Salesforce and Heroku signals the end of an era. 16 years on from the initial acquisition, and Heroku has been through some of Salesforce’s most challenging and notable developments to date; evidently, Heroku’s enterprise offering couldn’t make it through this one.