Bob Wise, CEO of Heroku, Salesforce’s cloud platform as a service (PaaS), has resigned. A Salesforce spokesperson confirmed the news to TechCrunch in an emailed statement.
“Bob Wise has left Salesforce to pursue the next part of his career,” a spokesperson said. “We appreciate all Bob has done for Salesforce and Heroku and wish him well.”
Bob Wise joins Heroku as GM from Amazon Web Services, where he was Kubernetes GM and Open Source Program Office Lead. Wise was promoted to CEO of Heroku in 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Wise’s ascension to CEO comes 10 years after Salesforce acquired Heroku for $212 million in cash. The platform allows programmers to build, run, and scale apps in a variety of programming languages, including Java, PHP, and Go.
Heroku claims on its website that Heroku has been used to develop more than 13 million apps to date.
Under the management of Salesforce and Wise, Heroku faced several challenges, including a security breach that allowed attackers to obtain access tokens to Heroku accounts used for automation purposes.
In August 2022, Heroku announced that it would discontinue its free plan, citing fraud and abuse as reasons for the change. Some users were understandably not happy and made their opinions known on social media.
“Our product, engineering and security teams are working incredibly hard to manage fraud and abuse of Heroku’s free product plans,” Wise said in a blog post at the time. “We will continue to provide affordable solutions for compute and data resources.”
Competition in the PaaS sector has become more intense in recent years, with companies like Porter, Railway, Render, Fly.io, and Clever Cloud vying for a piece of Heroku’s business with powerful features and tools. Wise has worked to engage with the developer community, including publishing a public roadmap for Heroku’s features and soliciting suggestions for improvements.
His departure is sure to impact Heroku’s efforts to regain market share. Salesforce has not yet announced replacement plans.
Relatedly, Heroku is still without a CPO after previous CPO Andy Fawcett returned to the UK to take up the role of VP of Developer Relations.
