Why MarketScout uses Heroku over other PaaS providers

MarketScout is a lean Australian startup that’s dependent on other cloud services to make it run, so when it came to deciding on a Platform-as-a-Service provider, the company had an important decision to make. They chose Salesforce-owned Heroku and still use it today.

MarketScout CTO Abhinav Keswani talked with AdWeek reporter (and former VentureBeat writer) Anthony Ha on stage at CloudBeat 2011. Keswani explained that the company, which acts as large-scale research platform for other businesses, chose Heroku over competitors like Engine Yard and Rackspace because it could help the company develop the form and function of the product rather building the infrastructure to serve the product.

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“At the outset, we believed that we needed an elastic platform to help us deploy our application,” Keswani said. “We wanted to build a scalable architecture to serve our enterprise customers. And Heroku has a rapid deployment lifecycle that assists with frequent iterations of change.”

In an interesting parallel, Heroku has grown up and added more abilities as MarketScout has grown as well.

“The platform has changed with added functionality and the ability to support multiple languages,” Keswani said. “No platform-as-a-service today could survice with just one language.”

Keswani especially liked the fact that Heroku offers you a choice and doesn’t keep you from leaving if you want to move the applications.

“What happens if you don’t use Heroku tomorrow?” Keswani said. “The offering they have actually allows you to move it to somewhere else. It’s not as easy as waving a magic wand, but you can relocate if you want to.”

Sydney, Australia-based MarketScout was founded in mid-2010 and currently has 10 employees. The company is currently self-funded but exploring opportunities for a large first round of funding.