Unite Customer-Facing Apps with a Salesforce Backend: Heroku Connect in Practice

Gordon Jackson, Principle Architect Heroku gjackson@salesforce.com

Tom Scott, VP Appirio Thursday, September 17, 2:00 - 2:40 Moscone West, 2006

Introductions

Heroku Connect: Seamless Data Sync between Force.com & PostgresQL

Heroku Connect Syncs Directly to Salesforce Clouds Seamless two-way data between customer-facing apps and your business on Salesforce

Employee Apps Customer Apps

Heroku Connect

About Diageo, Appirio & the Mobile Survey App

Diageo is a global leader ($21B revenue in 2014) in beverage alcohol with iconic brands in spirits, beer and wine.

About Diageo

Who is Appirio

Cloud & Crowd Strategy | Technology Implementation | Systems Integration Custom Development | Management Consulting | Change Enablement

More than 3.5 million users and 900 enterprises moved to the cloud

WHY?

Capture field intelligence from retail stores in order to evaluate distribution partner performance against goals and use as input to business decision-making.

HOW?

iOS and Android app for field sales to answer surveys about retail pricing, positioning, special displays, etc.

Salesforce as authoritative source of survey and result data. Heroku and Heroku Connect to act as service layer for mobile app.

WHEN?

October 2013 original rollout; now in version 3 with 100k+ surveys/month.

Diageo Mobile Survey App

The App in Action

Login; Nearby accounts; Survey List, Answer questions (types, photo), Review, Offline Live Demo

Salesforce Survey Setup

Salesforce Survey Question Creation

Salesforce Results

Salesforce Results

Application Architecture

Architecture Diagram

Why Heroku? Scalability (10k to 100+k overnight), licensing, de-couple db for better mobile UX

Why Heroku Connect? SFDC as master source for contacts, surveys/questions, results

Building integration code would take months and significant budget

Why Custom App? Need Diageo-specific UX everything from app icon to fully custom branding and UX

Hybrid speed to market and need for both iOS and Android support

Environment Management? Multiple full stack environments for dev, test, prod (mobile app, heroku, heroku connect, sfdc

sandboxes)

Mobile Survey Solution Architecture - FAQ

Benefits Very simple to setup and configure

Simply does its job synchronize data between SFDC and Heroku

Issues Encountered Sept 2013 10 min delay before Contact data available in Postgres (now can be real-time w/streaming

API)

Nov 2013 failed during SFDC maintenance (now self-corrects)

Mar 2014 switch from CloudConnect to HerokuConnect and default schema name change

Nov 2014 DB upgrade bug restricted change of Postgres DB without re-install

Mar 2015 DB upgrade delay provisioning new HC instance

Apr 2015 issue with related data creation when we populate NAME field (HC now protects against this)

Heroku Connect Lessons Learned

Q & A

www.heroku.com/connect

Thank you