SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Heroku, a leading cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and a salesforce.com company, today announced a major update to its Add-Ons Program focused on enabling business processes for cloud service providers. The Heroku Add-Ons Marketplace, version 2.0, consists of an updated developer-facing marketplace and a new service provider management experience, both of which offer add-on providers a guided path to business success.

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Heroku pioneered the concept of Add-Ons three years ago with the launch of 12 add-ons in its first marketplace. Since that time, the Heroku Add-Ons Program has grown to include 85 service providers with more than 4 million installs, allowing cloud service providers to focus on their core business while Heroku manages their business services. The Heroku Add-Ons Program helps cloud service providers with key business needs such as full lifecycle billing, full integration with customer applications, single sign-on customer log-in, an integrated end-user support experience and a Heroku sales team that actively sells the platform and add-ons. New with this release, Heroku is also introducing a self-service interface that allows providers to instantly manage their product portfolio. Service providers reap the benefits of faster time-to-market and higher user adoption, conversion and retention rates because they are able to dedicate more time to product development.

"The Heroku Add-Ons Program has been an incredible place for MemCachier to grow and learn. The Marketplace gives us instant access to thousands of developers, letting us focus on great customer service and product development," said Alex Loddengaard, co-founder, MemCachier. "Selling through the program is absolutely the right way to grow or start a product for web developers."

"Working with Heroku gives us a fast way to get our product out in front of folks who build systems every day. The familiarity of the tools and accessibility of documentation gave us a great starting point for building our brand with developers," said Brian P. O'Rourke, co-founder, Stovepipe Studios. "With Heroku, we could put off or skip entirely many of the boilerplate pieces of launching a product—letting us save time and focus on what we do best."

Features and Benefits

The Heroku Add-Ons Marketplace takes care of the business side of pushing a product to market, making all aspects of the product lifecycle easier for cloud service providers. The Add-Ons Marketplace also lets Heroku users easily find and consume cloud services and exposes cloud service providers to hundreds of thousands of potential customers. Included in the program are the following key features:

• Intuitive Self-Service Interface – Providers can instantly create and manage their add-ons, features, benefits and plans, allowing them greater flexibility for testing and marketing their products. Services can be deployed, configured and integrated into apps with one-click.
• Marketing Best Practices – New listing pages provide powerful customization for each add-on including best practices on marketing and customer engagement. Templates are included for creating new documentation, embedding documentation into sales pages, easy plan comparisons, personalized branding and visibility into analytics and marketplace performance so that no dedicated team of marketing specialists is required.
• Complete Billing Services – The program takes care of all aspects of the billing process for users including failed payments, declined cards, fraud and payment and bank transaction fees. This protects providers from the complexities and financial risks associated with integrating with payment gateways, fraud and failed, declined or expired credit cards.
• Dedicated Support – Heroku's support team provides first-level developer support, saving providers time by handling integration issues for them. A dedicated sales team is also available to help sell the Heroku platform along with providers' integrated services.

"Composed cloud services are the future for developing advanced applications," said Oren Teich, COO, Heroku.  "By giving cloud service providers an easier way to market their products and run their businesses, Heroku is redefining how technology products and applications are created and brought to market."

"What I love most about the Heroku Add-Ons Program is how well it streamlines the process of integrating with complex services, both for developers and service providers," said Nick Zadrozny, co-founder, One More Cloud. "Our tight integration with Heroku's add-on platform allows us to focus all of our energies into building and managing the best search engine service for developers so that developers themselves can focus their energies on their own applications. Working with the Heroku add-on platform saves valuable time for developers on both sides."

Availability

The upgraded Heroku Add-Ons Marketplace is currently open and available to all developers and cloud service providers and can be visited at https://addons.heroku.com/. Service providers who wish to apply may do so at https://addons.heroku.com/provider.

About Heroku  

Heroku, a salesforce.com company, has enabled hundreds of thousands of developers to build and run more than two million applications - all entirely in the cloud, without the need to purchase or maintain any servers or software.  With support for the most popular languages, an enterprise class database service and an add-on ecosystem featuring the most innovative development tools, Heroku provides start-ups, IT organizations and agencies with a faster and more effective way to create and deploy apps. For more information, please visit http://heroku.com/.

SOURCE Heroku