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If you work in finance, healthcare, logistics, retail, SaaS, or pretty much any business with a decent customer base, you’ve probably run into the same issue. What do we do with all this data?
Trying to shove every piece of it into your CRM or ERP can get expensive fast. Not to mention, it slows things down and makes your whole setup feel like it’s dragging its feet. That’s where Heroku comes in.
It’s kind of like a friendly data bouncer that hangs out in the middle, figures out what belongs where, and keeps your important systems from getting swamped.
Heroku as the Middleman (The Good Kind)
Heroku is great at catching data before it gets to your core systems. Think of it as a sorting room. It checks the packages, discards the junk mail, neatly stacks what matters, and only sends the good stuff upstream.
Here’s what it’s usually doing:
- Storing massive datasets your CRM wants no part of
- Cleaning up messy data that looks like it was written during a power outage
- Running logic to catch duplicates or flag incomplete entries
This keeps your CRM trim and focused instead of turning it into a digital junk drawer.
What Heroku Is Really Good At
Heroku comes with a few helpful tricks under the hood:
- Heroku Postgres keeps structured data in order like a spreadsheet that never crashes
- Redis helps store things temporarily when you need fast answers
- Apache Kafka is like your data’s hype man, keeping things moving in real time
You can mix and match these depending on how wild your data flow is. Together they help you:
- Import millions of records without sweating
- Build dashboards that update while you blink
- Archive old transactional info so your CRM isn’t stuck living in the past
Clean It Up Before You Send It In
You know that feeling when someone dumps raw unfiltered data into your CRM? It’s like tossing junk into a luxury car. It just doesn’t sit right.
Heroku lets the dev team do the cleaning first. You can:
- Wipe out duplicate records
- Normalize weird field values (is it “CA” or “California” or “Cali”?)
- Flag anything suspicious or incomplete
Devs can write your own desired logic here. It’s like giving your data a proper spa day before it enters your business systems.
A Real Life Example: The Partner Scorecard App
Let’s talk about a big tech company that works with tens of thousands of service and product partners around the world. They had one major goal: track how each partner was doing in terms of certifications, customer engagement, training completions, growth milestones, you name it. Think of it as fantasy football, but for business partners.
The problem? Their core systems weren’t built to handle that kind of volume or complexity in real time. Pulling reports took forever. Partner managers were trying to manage performance using spreadsheet spaghetti. And syncing all that data into the CRM was expensive and slow. It was like trying to run a marathon with a filing cabinet strapped to your back.
What We Built
Oktana stepped in and built a middleware solution using Heroku that could collect, clean, organize, and serve all that data, without dragging the CRM into it.
Here’s how it worked:
- Data ingestion: Data was flowing in from multiple sources — internal tools, external apps, third-party APIs. We funneled all of it into Heroku where a Node-based backend sorted it out.
- Storage: Heroku Postgres stored all partner-related data, including engagement history, certifications earned, and sales influence stats.
- Data transformation: We built logic into Heroku services to validate inputs, normalize inconsistent records (because no two systems spell “partner name” the same way), and flag incomplete entries.
- APIs: A set of REST APIs served partner data to a modern front-end built with React, also hosted on Heroku. Everything was fast, snappy, and didn’t make users wait through loading wheels of doom.
A Better Experience for Everyone
Partners logged into a slick web app and immediately saw a full breakdown of their performance. No more guessing where they stood. They could view:
- Their current level (Authorized, Gold, Platinum, etc.)
- Certification progress and gaps
- Marketing engagement and lead conversion trends
- A list of recommended actions to unlock the next level
On the internal side, partner account managers had an admin view showing global partner health, progress toward KPIs, and filters for sorting by region, tier, or vertical. No more digging through disconnected reports or emailing Bob in IT for an Excel export.
We also built a helpful little tool called the Org Picker. Sounds basic, but it saved the day. If a partner typed in the wrong org ID (which happened a lot), it would suggest possible matches based on metadata and historical usage. Think autocomplete for partner chaos.
The Results
- Login success rate went way up because partners could actually find themselves
- Fewer support tickets from partners asking why their data wasn’t showing up
- Better lead conversion rates tied directly to improved visibility and accountability
- Internal teams stopped burning cycles on basic data wrangling
- And bonus: API call volume to the CRM dropped dramatically
What used to be a clunky, manual, support-heavy process became a real-time, easy-to-use dashboard that everyone loved. Well, maybe not everyone — but we’re pretty sure at least one partner sent virtual cupcakes.
APIs That Actually Help
In most modern companies data lives in multiple places. Some of it is in the cloud. Some is in a database from 2003. Some might still be in an Excel file on someone’s desktop named “final_v4_REAL_THIS_ONE”.
Heroku is perfect for stitching that all together. You can build APIs in Node Python Go whatever your team likes and hook them up to Heroku Postgres. That way mobile apps internal tools and other systems all stay in sync without needing black magic.
Why This Is Cheaper and Smarter
Offloading the big data jobs to Heroku helps in more ways than one:
- Your CRM stops hogging storage and API limits
- Historical data lives in its own cozy corner
- You don’t need to keep buying licenses just to store old records from 2017
Heroku scales up and down depending on what’s happening. If things get busy it handles it. If things are quiet it doesn’t overcharge you for taking a nap.
Wrapping It All Up
Heroku is kind of like a flexible coworker who doesn’t mind doing the grunt work doesn’t complain and never forgets where the data came from. It helps you stay organized move faster and avoid overloading systems that were never meant to handle it all.
We’ve helped companies build Heroku based middleware systems that are reliable scalable and actually make sense for how they work. If you’re drowning in data or just tired of watching your CRM get slower by the day maybe it’s time to give Heroku a real role in your stack.
