Softtrends forged a strong partnership with Heroku, having spent the last decade building add-ons for both Heroku and Salesforce. We sat down with Softtrends’ co-founder and CRO, Scott Magnes, and its president and CEO DP Samantarai, to discuss how their company continues to build upon the framework that Heroku laid out more than a decade ago.
From corporate to cloud
Before launching Softtrends, founders Scott Magnes and Samant led teams building BIOS firmware that shipped on billions of PCs worldwide. Inspired by the rise of the cloud, they left AMI.com to build something new. Softtrends first thrived in the mobile boom, creating top-selling apps across Blackberry, Apple, and Google stores. As cloud platforms matured, they pivoted to building scalable, connected enterprise solutions.
Discovering Heroku—and becoming part of the community
After years on Azure and AWS, Softtrends discovered Heroku and were immediately struck by its simplicity and power. They moved quickly to build applications and integrations for customers on Heroku. Seeing a glaring gap—lack of native .NET support—they authored the first partner .NET Buildpack for Heroku. Forked thousands of times, it enabled a thriving ecosystem of .NET applications on the platform and helped usher in .NET as a performant, enterprise-ready language for Heroku customers.
We started exploring Azure architecture, then AWS, then we were introduced to Heroku and thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’ We built apps and connectors and had huge success with Salesforce — it’s been a fantastic relationship ever since.
— Scott Magnes, Softtrends Co-founder & CRO
Data from all directions
Customers needed to unify fragmented data across Heroku data services like Postgres & Kafka, and across clouds like Azure, GCP, and AWS. Softtrends’ Data Cloud and Marketing Connector made this simple, synchronizing data bi-directionally with Salesforce Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud. This enabled Heroku customers to create more personalized, real-time experiences that tapped into Data Cloud’s Customer 360 profiles while giving Heroku data back that would help Agentforce power new agentic experiences. Working in harmony, Softtrends’ Heroku add-ons help bring Salesforce Data Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Heroku data services closer than ever before.
With ~20% cleaner data and ~38% faster data workflows vs legacy ETL tools, customers gained sharper insights and accelerated activation within Data Cloud & Agentforce.
We used Boomi [built on Heroku] to move our data in and out of Marketing Cloud. The Softtrends Connector did it in ~40% less time with far fewer failures.
— VP of Marketing Technology, Global Retail Brand
A big request from customers was a means of speeding up their synchronization in the Multimedia Data Cloud Connector. Using other platforms would be slow or simply wouldn’t have the tools to let you easily configure multiple threads. With Softtrends’ Heroku add-ons, they were seeing 400% speed-ups in some cases.
Some customers wanted us to use AWS. Obviously, we also have this intent for them to use one of our add-ons, so we introduced them to Heroku. They could deploy and see the app running on Heroku at least 20 to 30 times faster than doing it on AWS. ‘Create an app and do this.’ That’s it. This is done, but when the same thing was done in AWS, they had to spend at least a week to two weeks.
— DP Samantarai, Softtrends President and CEO
Use cases across industries
Softtrends finds itself helping customers from all sorts of different industries. For instance, an airline company uses their add-ons to run its loyalty program. An appliance company uses it to track their customer support cases. A retail company uses it to capture customers from different Salesforce and website journeys that they can directly market to. A medical company that makes medical equipment uses it to track all customer interactions and generate reports. Compiling all these data points together and synchronizing them brings out the value of data insights that they all need, while making it smoother to create actionable tasks.
- A global airline streamlined baggage handling and ticket rebooking, lifting customer satisfaction by 18 points.
- A European football club used Softtrends to deliver near real-time ticket and merchandise personalization at FA Cup matches, boosting fan experiences.
We needed some custom insights generated on Heroku to be synced to Data Cloud to use in our Agentforce agents. The Softtrends team rolled support for it into their next release within two weeks. They’re incredibly responsive.
— Director of CRM, Major Retailer
Heroku’s flexibility around Private & Shield Spaces enabled Softtrends to extend their offerings into high-trust environments, helping regulated industries stay compliant without sacrificing their workload productivity.
Being able to run the Data Cloud Connector in our Heroku Shield Space ensures our compliant data isn’t compromised. Trust is maintained.
— CISO, National Insurance Group
Developers helping developers
Heroku’s open ecosystem was perfect for Softtrends’ “developers helping developers” philosophy. Their add-ons go beyond basic pipelines—they transform fields during sync, filter and retry routines, enforce primary keys & logic before Salesforce ingestion, and offer automated health checks throughout.
From a developer’s point of view, they were quite happy because they had to do a lot less. When deploying on and testing and releasing on Heroku, they could easily create multiple versions or multiple deployments.
— DP Samantarai, Softtrends President and CEO
Choosing Heroku—the obvious decision
The choice to use Heroku isn’t just for Softtrends’ customers; it is also what made the most sense to Samant and Scott as well. They wanted something that would be easy and cost-effective for both development and deployment.
We looked at Microsoft’s CRM product and Salesforce and there’s no contest. Salesforce has got the CRM market. We all know that. It’s kind of like a marriage of meeting in the middle with a product. It just made a lot of sense.
– Scott Magnes, Softtrends Co-founder and CRO
Simple for everyone
One of the big aha! moments for Softtrends was seeing the ease the developers had when deploying, testing, and releasing apps on Heroku. While loved by developers and admins alike, Softtrends’ add-ons also empower marketing teams. Setup takes under 30 minutes—a stark contrast to the weeks needed on other platforms and tools.
They’re up and running in half an hour. It runs so much faster on Heroku — they just add it to their Heroku App, click their desired Postgres tables, point to a destination like Data Cloud or Marketing Cloud, and they’re done…we do the rest!
— Samant
Softtrends also realized that a lot of their customers came from marketing departments, not just development departments. These customers lacked engineering or DevOps support, so ensuring that Softtrends could provide a simple Heroku add-on made a lot of sense. The result was an experience that a non-developer could get up and running in, at most, half an hour.
Looking ahead — Agentforce & the data agent
Softtrends is now innovating in the world of autonomous agents and the Digital Workforce. Their new Data Agent will not just guide customers on what data is being managed within their add-ons, but also surface governance insights, highlight optimization opportunities across the data sync pipe, and proactively flag risks—a true leap forward for data admins.
We needed some custom insights generated on Heroku to be synced to Data Cloud to use in our Agentforce agents. The Softtrends team rolled support for it into their next release within two weeks. They’re incredibly responsive.
— Director of CRM, Major Retailer
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How Softtrends did it
- Heroku’s PaaS offering was uniquely suited for their customers’ needs with simplified deployments, fast time-to-market, fixed pricing, and minimal DevOps overhead.
- Activating Agentforce in real time meant customers don’t need to clean up the data before use.
- Synchronized data between Heroku Postgres and marketing cloud using the Data Cloud & Marketing Connector.
- Building add-ons on Cloud Native Buildpacks, Heroku Connect, and Heroku Shield.
- Delivered add-ons like HDrive, DeDup, and Data Cloud & Marketing Connector, extending Heroku to solve critical enterprise challenges for Salesforce customers.
