Heroku CEO Bob Wise departs

Bob Wise, the CEO of Heroku, Salesforce’s cloud platform as a service (PaaS), has left. A Salesforce spokesperson confirmed the news to TechCrunch in a statement via email.

“Bob Wise has left Salesforce for his next career move,” the spokesperson said. “We appreciate all that Bob has done for Salesforce and Heroku and we wish him well.”

Bob Wise joined Heroku as GM from Amazon Web Services, where he was Kubernetes GM and head of the open source program office. Wise was promoted to CEO of Heroku in 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Wise’s rise to CEO came over a decade after Salesforce acquired Heroku for $212 million in cash. The platform allows programmers to build, run, and scale apps across a number of programming languages, including Java, PHP, and Go.

On its website, Heroku claims that it’s been used to develop more than 13 million apps to date.

Under Salesforce — and Wise’s — management, Heroku has faced a number of setbacks, including a security breach where attackers were able to obtain an access token for a Heroku account that was used for automation purposes.

In August 2022, Heroku announced that its free plans would be discontinued, citing fraud and abuse as reasons for the change. Some users weren’t pleased, understandably — and made their opinions known on social media.

“Our product, engineering, and security teams are spending an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans,” Wise said in a blog post at the time. “We will continue to provide low-cost solutions for compute and data resources.”

Competition in the PaaS sector has grown fiercer in recent years, with companies like Porter, Railway, Render, Fly.io, and Clever Cloud vying for a slice of Heroku’s business with compelling capabilities and tooling. Wise made efforts to engage with the developer community, posting a public roadmap of Heroku’s features and soliciting suggestions for improvements.

His departure is certain to have an impact on Heroku’s efforts to claw back market share. Salesforce has yet to announce plans for a replacement.

Relatedly, Heroku is still without a CPO after its previous CPO, Andy Fawcett, moved back to the U.K. to assume the role of VP of developer relations.