Heroku and Salesforce are bringing modern development tools and enterprise technology together under a single platform. The two companies have announced Salesforce1 Heroku Connect, a synchronization service similar to Dropbox or iCloud that provides an easier way to connect customer data in Salesforce with next-generation customer apps.

“Every company now feels an urgency to create similarly compelling, connected applications for their customers,” said Adam Gross, VP of products at Heroku. “By integrating the business data and process strengths of Salesforce with Heroku’s capabilities for consumer Internet apps, Salesforce1 Heroku Connect provides a complete solution to this increasingly critical need.”

Heroku Connect integrates two core components of the Salesforce1 platform: Force.com and Heroku. Both are cloud platforms, but they each focus on different things. Heroku focuses on customer-facing apps with open-source stacks, while Force.com focuses on enterprise applications.

“By bringing together the data layers of the Force.com and Heroku platforms—and thus allowing the same data to be seamlessly reflected in each cloud’s native database—you can use the capabilities of each platform together in a single application, without having to translate or otherwise integrate between them,” Heroku wrote on its blog.

With Heroku Connect, data flows between the Heroku Postgres databases and Salesforce1, allowing developers to build apps that combine business processes.  

Features include the ability to access Salesforce data via SQL, optimized Force.com API interactions, and point-and-click configuration.

Salesforce1 Heroku Connect will be available as a part of the Salesforce1 Connected Customer App Package.

More information is available here.