Powering Salesforce with Heroku and Integrate.io

Did you know that you can use Heroku and Integrate.io with Salesforce? While the Salesforce platform is plenty powerful on its own, you can supercharge it if you know what you’re doing.

What is Salesforce?

No matter what type of business you operate, you’ve likely heard of Salesforce, but you may not have actually used it. Salesforce is a customer relationship management tool (CRM). This cloud-based software helps companies make marketing and sales a smoother process. It’s one of the top platforms in the world for this purpose.

As a SaaS company, Salesforce lets businesses use its platform without setting it up first or maintaining and updating software. Everything lives on the Cloud, accessible from anywhere, and upgraded by Salesforce itself.

The company offers a range of products including:

•  Sales Cloud
•  Service Cloud
•  Analytics Cloud
•  App Cloud
•  loT Cloud
•  Marketing Cloud
•  Commerce Cloud
•  Health Cloud
•  Financial Services Cloud

Each of these services provides a unique solution for companies. For example, the Sales Cloud lets companies close deals faster thanks to lead and contact management, sales forecasting, reports, and sales performance management.

The other services are similar, each with its own specialty. Because it's on the Cloud, Salesforce is affordable for companies that want to use a CRM system. This facilitates efficiency and sales, but it also allows companies to manage their sales data and use that information to create better systems. Once a business knows how to sell better, it affects everything from marketing to customer interactions.

Much of Salesforce runs automatically, which reduces costs overall. It features automated data entry—collecting, studying, and analyzing the information to provide companies with the insights they need to boost business growth.

Why Use Heroku with Salesforce

Heroku offers Heroku Connect, a nearly live copy of your Salesforce data in the PostgreSQL database. It’s a cloud-based computing service that offers app containers (referred to as dynos) that can easily scale. You can group dynos together to create the desired amount of space, and you may add more as necessary. You build everything in the Cloud, so you don't have to manage an actual server.

Heroku also supports eight programming languages, which means you can program it to meet your specific needs. It uses Apache Kafka for distributed messaging, contains data in the PostgreSQL relational database, and provides a Redis key-value data store. There are hundreds of other add-ons, as well. Each one makes data processes more streamlined and effective.

The platform provides pre-configured packages, eliminating the need for configuration. If you need certain basic configurations, you can just load them up on the Linux virtual machine. Web servers, databases, and extra programming languages are all available to you, making data collection and app creation simpler.

Integrate.io and Heroku can be integrated, so you manage all your ETL needs with Integrate.io. Once you have created and deployed an app, the data moves around via Integrate.io. Overall, it is a very efficient system that more and more people are using with their Salesforce application.

How Integrate.io Can Help

The ability to share Salesforce data is one of the biggest reasons companies like it. You can send the information you collect to different organizations or groups. While it’s possible to do Salesforce to Salesforce transfers, most companies find it easier to use a third-party data integration tool. With Integrate.io’s integrations, it's a snap to transfer data to a single service or across your entire company.

Integrate.io provides far more options for your Salesforce data than you might expect. For example, you can add customer data without having to write any code. With Integrate.io, you can edit or clean it, and modify it as you see fit. From there, you'll use the ETL process to pass the data along to its destination.

Most platforms of this type only offer one-way data transfer. They will pass it to Salesforce or transfer it away, but they will rarely do both. Integrate.io solves this issue, permitting data transfer in both directions. It’s also one of the few platforms that allow for data transformation. Most will transfer the data as an exact copy. Altering data is very easy with Integrate.io, so you can shape the data when required.

Putting it All Together

Heroku and Integrate.io work well together and with Salesforce, as they basically streamline the entire process of collecting, transforming, and loading data. Any company that uses Salesforce to manage its sales accounts and lead tracking will also benefit from these other platforms. Enterprises that use Salesforce as a standalone will find it lacking because the information has to be cut and pasted before they can collect it and make use of it in flat files.

Heroku Connect automates the data collection and replicated objects between Salesforce and Heroku’s PostgreSQL database. However, synchronizing everything can be a challenge. This is where Integrate.io comes in. Thanks to its ability to create data pipelines with no coding necessary, it’s the perfect option for transforming and cleaning data before moving it to another database.

Interested in learning more about integrating Integrate.io and Heroku with Salesforce? Set up a meeting today.