Vestmark Increases DevOps Efficiency by 80% with Heroku | Dreamforce 2025

And before we get started, I want to convey a big thank you to all of you. Thank you for being a customer, thank you for being a partner, and thank you for trusting us at Heroku. And with that, I want to introduce ourselves.

Hi, I'm Freedom Dumlao. I'm the Chief Technology Officer at Vestmark.

Hi everyone, I'm Nitin Bhatti. I'm the Chief Product Officer and CEO of Heroku. Please raise your hands if you have ever felt you want to spend more time doing infrastructure. Anyone? I don't see anyone raise their hand. Me neither. Don't want to spend time managing infrastructure. Want to talk to you about the landscape today. You know, one statistic is developers spend less than 20% of their time on coding and majority of their time just getting their infrastructure set up. And if you think about businesses today, what is happening with businesses, it is complex. There is challenges on the observability and the trust side and also the tools which are existing, they are not really well connected and there are huge data silos. And what are your customers demanding from you? Your customers demand integrated experiences from you. They demand that sales and marketing and product is all connected together in one single vignette. What your customers also demand is hyper personalization. That the product or the capabilities you have work according to their needs, that it is efficient and effective. And lastly, they want real time interactions. That means the latency is low and it's super fast. With this in context now, what you want to frame or think about is how can you innovate quickly without getting slowed down by the complexities of infrastructure. And with that, I present to you, Forest.

Hi everyone. So first just a quick note about who Vestmark is. Vestmark is the leading portfolio management and trading technology platform with over 1.7 trillion in assets under management. We are proud to serve six of the nation's 10 largest wealth management firms as well as so many innovative asset managers, retail investment advisories, broker dealers and banks. When I joined Vestmark a year ago, we had a huge challenge in front of us. We were looking for a way to innovate quickly and build new products and get them to our customers so that we could find out if we were solving all of their needs. It was also important to us that as we did that, that everything we built maintained the very strict security and compliance standards that a company like Vestmark must meet. Not just for regulatory reasons, but because it's important to us that we maintain the trust of our clients. And we also wanted to make sure that as we did this, we were realizing value, and we wanted to be able to understand that we were creating new value quickly and easily so we could abandon projects in favor of those which were going to give us a better outcome for our clients. So why did I pick Heroku? Well, first of all, the speed and simplicity came right out of the box. I'd had some experience with Heroku in the past, and I knew four command lines is all it took to be able to get any project up and running and hosted on the cloud. I wanted to be able to focus on what we were building on the product we were taking to market, and not on what was underneath it. I wanted to be able to have something that I could just trust worked the way that it needed to have the security and compliance set up that I needed for my clients so I could focus on the new product stuff. And I wanted to know that whatever changed about our business in the future, AI everybody that I was going to be working with a partner who was already investing in and getting ready to support us in that way as well. So Heroku does this really, really well. Without Heroku, what we started focusing on was building out the mechanisms that were necessary to deploy software to the cloud. And we had a variety of different technologies that we needed to deploy constantly and consistently, and we wanted to do this repeatably over and over again. The problem was we were spending so much of our energy on that deployment that we had very little time to invest in the actual application itself. Heroku gave us the ability to multiply the team's ability to deliver without having to grow infrastructure. If you take a look at this, this chart here, every box that's on this chart, this is a real piece of infrastructure that a company like Vestmark and probably a company like yours has to be thinking about. Underneath the system that you're building, take away the application, take away the capability, you're actually delivering the thing that your customer is buying from you, and you still have all this to think about. To me, this is what I did not want to be thinking about when I was trying to figure out if our latest product was something that our customers were going to be excited by or something that they were going to take a pass on. So I'll tell you a quick story. When I first got to Vestmark, I learned about our most recent product release. A product that took two and a half years to reach its first V1 deployment. The product was very innovative, very cool, had some uptake already, but two and a half years to get to V1 just seemed absolutely insane to me. And I could not understand it. So I started figuring maybe we didn't have the right talent, maybe we didn't have the right process or plan. So I started talking with the team and I learned we had brilliant engineers and they were so motivated and wanting to ship. We had incredible product people also like, determined to build great products and ship them. And I learned it wasn't about the talent, it was about time. You see, we were building infrastructure to make deployment work well. But while we were doing that, we were sacrificing time that we could have been investing in delivering this product. And when it takes six months until the next release comes out of your product, you start to worry like, well, if I don't get this feature in now, then it'll be six months until I can get this feature in. And that kind of worry builds and builds until suddenly 2 1/2 years until V1 launches. So that was a problem I wanted to fix right away. So we shifted our tech stack. We picked a developer focused tech stack in Ruby on Rails and a developer focused tech stack in Heroku. We started building and we went from having previously taken 200, or sorry, 913 days to release a product to V1 to 43 days from getting the first line of code to getting the product in the hands of a very happy and excited customer. That was revolutionary for Bestmark and it became something that we were able to start doubling down on immediately. When we looked back at what did that mean for us to do that 43 day shipping, it meant that we actually reduced our infrastructure energy expenditure, but by 80%. And the startup costs were also very low because we didn't have to think too much about the future scale. Cause we knew as this thing scaled up, Heroku was gonna be able to scale up with us. So I wanna talk a little bit about what that did, what that really meant for Bestmark. So we've been on this journey now of continuously shipping new products. We went from releasing every six months or every year to releasing every every week. And we could do better. We could actually be releasing every day if we like to, thanks to Heroku. But having that time back has meant a lot for us. What it means is we've been able to use that time to invest. And we recently launched our newest product, the Advisor Assistant, which is an AI product that helps financial advisors do less of the menial tasks that are part of their job, so they can focus on actually producing great advice for their clients. It's also allowed us to start Leveraging new technologies like MCP so that we can build better integrations with the technology that our clients are starting to build for themselves. And we've started working with Heroku looking at. Sorry. With Heroku and Salesforce looking at how we can use agentforce to produce new capabilities that allow us to grow the business beyond the boundaries of what we've traditionally done with our clients. So I have a huge debt of gratitude to pay to Heroku, Nitin and the team. Thank you so much. It's meant a lot to Vestmark getting a chance to work with you all.

Awesome. Thank you. And this leads us to what is really the value prop for Heroku today. Heroku is AI platform As a service we are the managed Salesforce platforms which allow you to extend agent force to your own use cases and needs. And what it also allows you to build custom apps using more than nine programming languages of your choice. It could range from Java to C Sharp to Ruby. And that portfolio of languages it gives you to support to extend agent force as well as build line of business applications is huge. I want to talk about three specific numbers and these are big takeaways as you think about why you should use Heroku in your environment. The first one is this accelerated time to market. As Forrest was talking about this, it was such an interesting statistics as we were discussing that that 43 days initially it was two and a half years and two and a half years got reduced to 43 days to the V1 of that deployment. So that is something we are consistently seeing with our customers. The ability for developers to increase their productivity. It has increased by more than 40% for our customers when they use Heroku. So that is part one. The second part is spending time on dev operations expenses. Our ability to abstract all the complex infrastructure decisions that gives you the ability to reduce your dev operation expenses. And the last piece is really about return on investment. At the end of it there are three things you really care about. Top line, bottom line as well as how you are getting return on investment. So there is a paper here. If you look at the QR code I would highly encourage you to look at this Forrester paper we have and what we have seen done by the third party like Forrester. It was a return of 286% ROI return in the three years when customers use Heroku. So that is something I want to leave you with. It's about developer productivity, cutting down the devop experiences. And the third one is a huge return on your roi. And lastly as I wrap up I want to convey my thanks and gratitude on behalf of the whole Heroku team to us customers and partners and great. I'm really thankful for Westmark being here and supporting us in our journey and logistics wise. Coffee's on us. We love to hear back from you. So people who first 4,000 attendees who give us feedback receive a Starbucks card. So if you have feedback for us, we'd love to hear back from you. So please give us feedback. And lastly, session summaries are going to be available soon so it will be on your Salesforce event mobile app. With that, it's a wrap from our side. Thank you so much.

Thank you.