Heroku in the Wild: Vanshiv on Using the Right Tools

Narrator
Hello and welcome to Code[ish], an exploration of the lives of modern developers. Join us as we dive into topics like languages and frameworks, data and event-driven architectures, artificial intelligence, and individual and team productivity. Tailored to developers and engineering leaders, this episode is part of our “Heroku in the Wild” series.

Julián
Hello, hello and welcome to Code[ish]. My name is Julián Duque, principal developer advocate for Heroku and your host here at the Code[ish] podcast. We recently announced our partnership program, and today we have the opportunity to be with one of the founding members of the Heroku Lighthouse Partners, Vanshiv. With me we have the CEO of Vanshiv, Gaurav Kheterpal. Gaurav, how are you doing?

Gaurav
Thanks, Julián. Very happy to be here. I’m doing well. How are you?

Julián
I’m pretty good. Thank you so much. So, first and foremost, thank you for joining us. I know it is late where you are right now, but it’s always a pleasure to be talking to our partners, practitioners, and our developer community.

Gaurav
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Like, it’s my absolute pleasure to be here and be a proud Heroku partner. I’m glad we got a chance to connect about this podcast.

Julián
Beautiful. Gaurav, I know you have been part of the Salesforce ecosystem for a while. Can you tell us a little bit more about your story and how you came into Salesforce? How long have you been here?

Gaurav
Yes, absolutely. So I’ll take the clock back by 18 years to 2007.

Julián
Wow.

Gaurav
That’s when my Salesforce journey started. That’s when I kind of opened the first Salesforce org. And I still use that org, so a lot of fun memories. And since then, like, it’s been a great journey. I’ve spent about 18 years in the ecosystem. I became a Salesforce MVP. I became a MuleSoft ambassador. Salesforce showcased me as a developer success story as a Trailblazer. Along the way, I think a few years after I kind of picked up Salesforce, one of the projects involved Heroku, and that’s where my Heroku journey started. So I did the Heroku Developer Certification, the Heroku Architect Certification. And again, we have been doing a lot of interesting work on Heroku, so I’m glad that we got a chance to connect here.

Julián
Oh, beautiful. So how much Salesforce has changed in these 18 years? You say that you still have that first org. How much is that changed for you?

Gaurav
Oh, I would say it’s a completely different platform now. Like when I kind of joined I think it was s-controls. Visualforce was like kind of prime time, and there was nothing called LWC, there was nothing like any of the new tools. But I think now it’s a completely different platform, and I would say it’s changed for the better. And again, a lot of it has been an organic growth for Salesforce as well, like marketing, commerce, even Heroku in that sense. It’s been a fantastic addition to the overall Salesforce ecosystem. So I would say it’s much more powerful. There are a lot more opportunities than there were 18 years back, not just from a partner perspective, but also from a career perspective as well. Like if somebody is starting off today, there are a lot of opportunities. You could be a Heroku developer, you could be a Heroku architect, you could be a Salesforce developer, a business analyst, an architect, a marketing cloud specialist, a lot of opportunities.

Julián
Yeah. Salesforce has experienced a lot of evolution throughout these years. We had like force.com, the Salesforce platform, Customer 360, Data Cloud, Agentforce, you name it. For you, what has been the most exciting evolution of the Salesforce platform that you say, okay, this is definitely changing the way business is being done on the cloud.

Gaurav
That is a difficult question. It’s like asking me to pick my favorite child, but I will name a few. So again, I have a deep background in commerce on Salesforce. The way Salesforce has kind of evolved the commerce suite with B2B, B2C. I think that is fascinating. And again, this goes back when the original platform was Demandware, and on the B2B side it was Cloud Trace. Now those platforms are much more powerful than what they were in the early stage. I also do a lot of work on MuleSoft. So again, that’s again a platform with Composer, with RPA, with IDP, those modern advanced capabilities, that platform is again much more powerful and the community is also fantastic. And obviously like Heroku as well, it was a dominant platform back then as well. But now I think it’s a more holistic platform. We have, like, several clients who use both Salesforce and Heroku, and that’s where the best of both worlds kind of shine. So if I were to pick three, that would be Commerce, MuleSoft, and then Heroku.

Julián
Beautiful. And what about this new world we are living in? This world of artificial intelligence and generative AI.

Gaurav
Yeah. So I always say that AI will not take your job, but somebody who knows AI better than you will definitely will take your job.

Julián
100%.

Gaurav
So, AI is no longer optional. It’s now or never that all of us need to learn AI. Even though, like, I am a founder and CEO, I am very hands-on and I’ve been digging deep into AI for the last several months and things like Agentforce, Data Cloud, and even outside the Salesforce platform like Gemini, Claude, OpenAI, like all the work that’s being done, I think it’s phenomenal. It’s going to change software development forever. And again, the choice is ours. If we, if we don’t keep up with it, we’ll definitely be left behind.

Julián
That’s 100% true. For me, I’ve been using recently more and more coding agents, Not only for building applications and the demos I build here at Heroku, but also to build agentic applications, like using agents to build agents. And it’s a powerful tool. Obviously you will need to have all the fundamentals. This is something that, sure, somebody that doesn’t know how to code or how to write a program can use. But if you want to get like 100%, the power that this tool’s giving you, if you have the fundamentals, if you have the knowledge, you are really, really approaching this.

Gaurav
100%. It’s an absolute game changer. I’m a heavy user of tools like Cursor. I also use some of the Copilot tools. On the Google side I’ve been experimenting with Firebase Studio as well, and just the ideology of being able to build an application using a prompt and natural language, I don’t think any of us would have imagined that would happen 10 years or 15 years or like even 25 years back when I started my career. So, they rightly say English is the new program… universal programing language, and I think that’s how it will play out for the future as well.

Julián
It is becoming a reality. So, for a person like you that has been not only within the Salesforce ecosystem, but like being a technology practitioner for a while, how do you keep up-to-date? What is your approach to be up-to-date, not only on all the things that Salesforce releases, but to keep up to date with what the technology environment is releasing every week?

Gaurav
This question comes in very often for me, and I think it’s a combination of multiple things. One is that I’m genuinely passionate about technology, so when I’m reading about things and when I’m trying out these experiments, it doesn’t really feel like work to me. It’s something I enjoy doing. So, that’s number one. Second is over a period of time, I’ve also developed some discipline. So, every day at least an hour, in some days it’s two hours, it’s actually blocked off on my calendar as my own kind of learning time. So I’m actually one of the top three Salesforce most certified experts. That includes my Heroku certifications as well. So, that discipline has also helped. And a lot of it is also like the kind of tooling that I and a lot of other people use. So, tools like NotebookLM to kind of gather notes and kind of learn about new topics, all these fantastic tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini. I’m a pretty heavy user. So again, those kind of help accelerate the learning as well.

Julián
Beautiful. So, let’s talk a little bit more about Vanshiv. When did you start with the company? When did you have like the idea and what type of services and projects do you work on?

Gaurav
So, Vanshiv started in January 2023, so we are about two and a half years old, but I’ve kind of been in similar roles, like executive leadership roles where I would set up and scale Salesforce practices. So I’ve been doing similar things, but the only difference was I was doing it for other companies. And in 2023 January, I thought, I’m not getting any younger, and if I have to start my own company, it’s now or never. That’s how Vanshiv kind of started. I had two co-founders who joined in and believed that we could create something special. So, we have about 110 people. We work a lot on the core Salesforce platform, so we call it the evergreen clouds, which is the core platform sales service experience. Apart from that, there’s a lot of work that we do on commerce, financial services, MuleSoft, Heroku, and then we also have some non-Salesforce plays as well. Like we do a little bit of work around AWS, Google Cloud, Boomi, platforms like Workato. So, all of that is a part of our full stack and integration practice. But yeah, it’s been a phenomenal journey for the last 13 months I would say. We are already a Summit-tier consulting partner. Now we are a Heroku Lighthouse Partner. Yeah, it’s been great so far. And we have customers in the US, Canada, Australia, UK, Singapore, Dubai, also in one-off regions like South Africa, Norway, and we are constantly expanding that footprint. So, it’s been a great journey so far, and now this year we are hoping to expand further.

Julián
Wonderful. One question. You mentioned that you cover a lot of the different platforms that Salesforce has, but you go beyond that. MuleSoft, AWS, Google Cloud, other types of products and services out there. How does that multi-cloud expertise that you and your company has changed the nature of that conversations you have with your clients compared to, let’s say, a partner that only speaks Salesforce?

Gaurav
Yeah. So, I think that has helped us a lot. And I was very clear, even in one of my previous roles, I had set up these multi-cloud practices. The problem with being a specialized player or being a niche player in one area is I will say, give an example, like if you are building a solution and maybe you are building it on, I would say Boomi and Boomi is not a great fit, but because you are a Boomi partner, you are trying to fit Boomi there or Heroku there, or for that matter AWS there, that’s not doing justice to the customer. Just because you have those skills and the customer trusts you, you should not be giving customers a wrong advice. And sometimes it’s very, very clear that customers also have their own preferences. So, when it comes to Infrastructure as a Service, we work with AWS, we work with GCP, we work with Heroku. There have been customers who are very clear to us okay, we want to use Heroku. We have kind of done our due diligence. Can you help us with that? So, again it’s a combination of multiple factors. Salesforce is still our biggest practice by far. It’s a majority of what generates our revenue. But it’s been a conscious strategy to go multi-cloud and go horizontal rather than like just stay vertical within Salesforce.

Julián
Yeah, that’s very wise and of course open a lot of doors for you and your business. So, speaking about partnership, as we mentioned before, you are one of the founders of the Heroku Lighthouse Partners, one of the companies that started with this process. What does this designation signify for you, like being a Heroku Lighthouse Partner or a Salesforce partner? Why this is important?

Gaurav
Oh, this is absolutely critical. I mean, for a partner like us, there’s a little over 100 people who get that kind of recognition from Heroku as one of the very few, I think, less than 10 launch partners for the Lighthouse program. That means a lot to us. It also means a lot for our customers, and it also signifies how closely we have kind of worked with Heroku over the years, whether it’s again working on deals together, working on support issues, providing feedback on features. So, it’s something that we really appreciate as a partner. And again, the Heroku Partner has been really good to work with us, very responsive. Whenever we have had a request, they have been very responsive and generally have accommodated our request. So, very grateful. Counting our blessings that we actually are one of… and I think we are the only partner from India to be included in this launch. So yeah, very, very grateful to Heroku for, for including us.

Julián
That’s amazing. And definitely I wish a lot of success for you. And of course Heroku in this partnership. This is going to be a very difficult question. It’s why Heroku is important for you and your business?

Gaurav
So, I think the first time I landed on Heroku, I was prototyping a simple web application, and I just needed to get it up and running and then experiment with it. And I had already seen like AWS, I’d seen some of the other platforms, and I think just the ease in terms of which I was able to kind of deploy and get it up and running and use some of the plugins. I think that kind of got me started on Heroku. As I said, in some cases customers have also done their due diligence. We had a customer who was, okay, I want to build this app. I’m very clear. I want to build a Node.js backend, frontend. They had certain frameworks in mind and I want to use Heroku. And we said yeah, we will build it for you. And there are also customers where they need some guidance. They need a partner to tell them, okay, this is my budget. This is my requirement. Should I be going down the AWS route? Should I be looking at something like this solution? Should I be looking at Heroku or any other XYZ platform? And as I said earlier, as a partner like which is true to technology, we should be giving them the right guidance, not just because like we are an AWS partner or a Heroku partner. So, we kind of take it on a project-to-project basis, whatever is the best fit. And a lot of cases it is Heroku and we would recommend Heroku. If we think Heroku is not a good fit, we would actually not recommend it. So it’s as simple as that.

Julián
Yeah, I’m a believer of always using the right tool for the job.

Gaurav
Yeah.

Julián
And that’s related to a framework, a programing language, a platform. I know there are like a lot of different popular languages out there, but some of them are not very fit for, like, solving specific problems. So what are the most common use cases you are building on Heroku, you are helping your customers to build on Heroku?

Gaurav
Yeah. So, one of the applications we have built, and again, this was a great example of rapid application development on Heroku, is a marketplace where members can actually engage with developers, kind of engage them on tasks. So there, I think, our primary use case was, again, went with a MEAN stack there, and we wanted to keep the costs within check. One of the use cases is that forum will scale. It will start off with a few hundred users, and then it will go to thousands. And hopefully it will kind of go to a million plus users. So again, we wanted a platform where the platform itself could scale and we don’t end up paying like a fortune from day one. The customer did not want to invest very, very heavily. And the way Heroku is priced I think made it very conducive. There’s another company where they have built a platform on Heroku, which is for like online testing of students. So they conduct lessons across like multiple subjects. And then we have built a custom application which is also posted on Heroku. So there again the requirement was a solid platform with SLAs in terms of reliability, uptime, scalability, and then support for databases which can be scaled up, scaled down, auto-scaling, those kind of considerations also affected that decision. And again both of these engagements are successfully running on Heroku.

Julián
Nice. And in this multi-cloud environment that you work with, have you had the opportunity to integrate either Heroku and Salesforce or Heroku and MuleSoft or Heroku with other different other platform?

Gaurav
Yeah, we have done a couple of projects which have involved Heroku Connect, which is basically like offering which connects Salesforce and Heroku. And again, it actually made our life much easier. Earlier we were thinking of a custom solution, but then we decided to go with Heroku Connect. It saved a lot of development time. Also, I think the cost kind of justified itself. It was, I think not that much. So, we’ve done multiple projects where we have involved Heroku as a middleware and then also used it with Salesforce.

Julián
Beautiful. When you are guiding your customers on the solution to implement, you mentioned that there like some customers that require guidance that require for you to show them the way. How do you show the technical value of a platform like Heroku to a non-technical person, like a CFO or a COO? How do you sell them the value of a platform like Heroku?

Gaurav
Yeah. So, I think it is all down to the ROI associated with the platform. A lot of the customers that we have are early stage. They are startups where they want to go through the whole lifecycle, but they don’t want to commit to the big platform, which would tie them down. So in that sense, I think Heroku is minimal set-up. It’s like a plug and play. You basically focus on building out the application, not the infrastructure. And then I think that the big flexibility is the add-ons. Like something you need in-memory cache, Redis, you need a database, Postgres or you need monitoring like Neuralink or Datadog. So I think those are big upsells when you want to build an application and you want no hassles, you just want to focus on the core business problem. And Heroku kind of takes care of itself. So, I think that’s been our kind of pitch to customers who have come to us asking for guidance. Obviously, if it’s a very big customer and they need a lot of services which are not available on Heroku, then we would obviously consider some alternative platforms in that case. Again, things like it could also be specific data residency-related considerations or any compliance-related considerations would also kind of dictate what sort of platform we use. But in general, I think it’s come down to the ease of use, rapid application development, and a no-frills platform.

Julián
Oh, that’s wonderful. Thank you so much. You mentioned Heroku Connect as being one key component for integration between Salesforce and Heroku. But looking ahead, looking into the future, how do you see that relationship between Salesforce and Heroku evolving? What do you think it is missing today or what are you excited about that is coming in the future? What is in your wishlist?

Gaurav
So, it’s a very good question, and I think the way Salesforce works with Heroku is via Heroku Connect. And then the philosophy is ‘how do you get external data into Salesforce?’ So there is another product which is Data Cloud, which obviously has a very similar philosophy that works with a number of other sources. You can have streams, you can have any system that uses Pub/Sub to pull data or push it out. So all of that is possible. I think what possibly can be done with Heroku and Heroku Connect is more real-time capabilities, similar to how Data Cloud has a copy… has a concept of zero copy. I’m sure if it’s there in some form or the other, even if it’s there it’s not that easy to use or not that obvious. So, I think we would love to see a little bit more support around connecting to all these different kind of platforms, pretty much the kind of capabilities that Data Cloud has, but also supporting Heroku.

Julián
Wonderful. This has been amazing insights from you and your experience. Now let’s finalize this conversation to talk to our audience. We have a lot of people from the Salesforce ecosystem and the overall developer community listening right now. Do you have any advice for them? How can they continue on a learning process? How can they prioritize where to spend the time right now to become a multi-cloud expert like you?

Gaurav
That’s an interesting one. So, I think you need to start somewhere. And I think the way I kind of started was I had good fundamentals on Salesforce. I picked up Heroku. Then AWS kind of happened to me, then GCP and then some of the others. But I think you need to kind of build a learning plan, a roadmap for yourself. And it cannot be like, I’ll do it for two months, or I’ll do it for six months and then be done with it. If you do that, you’ll probably end up learning one platform and not go beyond that. But I think you need, a multi-cloud enterprise architect you need to plan your journey, and it takes years and it takes a lot of discipline. So I would say that’s how I would suggest. One step at a time. The advantage is that the concepts are very, very similar. So all the core architecture concepts, their design patterns are similar. It’s just that the nomenclature, the syntax is maybe different. So, my advice would be to plan your journey like one platform at a time and give it a few months and then do the relevant certifications as well. I’m a big believer that certifications bring in a lot of discipline to our learning. The actual certificate may or may not matter that much, but I think the learning that comes in preparing for that certification, that is something and the pressure that comes with it, I think that sometimes you need that extra pressure just for somebody to kind of nudge us in the right direction. So, I would say veer for those certifications, plan it out for a few months, take a break for a little bit and then move on to the next thing.

Julián
That’s wonderful advice. And last but not least, this is a topic that is very close to my heart. You are incredibly active in the Trailblazer community. You have led user groups. You have spoke globally at different events. Why being part of a community is important both personally and professionally?

Gaurav
I would say the community has shaped my career. If it was not for the community, I would probably not be running like a successful business today. So, I have been very fortunate that a lot of people from the community have actually helped me, and then that’s the reason I am active. It’s a cyclic process I believe. People help you. You kind of help people. You give back and the cycle continues. So, and again, I think credit to again, Salesforce, the community that Salesforce has. I’m a part of other communities as well. And again, those are very special as well. But the Salesforce community is very closely knit, and I have a lot of good friends from the ecosystem. Like as I said, a lot of fellow MVP’s, a lot of fellow MuleSoft ambassadors, and it’s been a fantastic journey just learning alongside some of the best minds from globally. And then, yeah, I mean, as I said, I would not be where I am if it was not for this community. So, very grateful and happy to be contributing, whether it’s through speaking at events like Dreamforce, Trailhead DX, Connections, Salesforce World Tours, or running the local architect group. Very fortunate that I have these opportunities.

Julián
I can say the same for me. That community has been, for me, the best way to learn.

Gaurav
Yeah.

Julián
Like be able to be part of a community. Well, Gaurav, thank you. Thank you so much for your time. And where can our listeners go to learn more from you and to follow what Vanshiv is doing?

Gaurav
Yeah, so you can just search for my name on Google. It’ll give you a few links, including my personal blog, which is gauravkheterpal.com, vanshiv.com, which is the company website. You can also read my Trailblazer story on the Salesforce site. And then it will also hopefully show a lot of the talks that I have given, so I presented at TDX, Dreamforce, a bunch of other events as well. And I’m also fairly active on LinkedIn as well as Twitter. Those are good channels to reach out to me.

Julián
Fantastic. We will make sure to share all those links in the show notes. And thank you so much for your time. Looking forward to have you again at the Code[ish] podcast and any other Heroku event.

Gaurav
Thank you so much, Julián. The pleasure is all mine. Thank you.

Julián
Of course, and thank you all for all the listeners out there that connected with the Code[ish] podcast. See you on the next one.

Narrator
Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Code[ish] podcast. Code[ish] is produced by Heroku. The easiest way to deploy, manage, and scale your applications in the cloud. If you’d like to learn more about Code[ish] or any of Heroku’s podcasts, please visit heroku.com/podcasts.