Heroku, a salesforce.com company and industry pioneer in cloud application development, today announced that Tod Nielsen has joined the company as chief executive officer. Nielsen comes to Heroku from VMware where he served in a variety of roles over his tenure including chief operating officer, co-president running the application platform group, and most recently as part of Pivotal Labs, the venture created from EMC and VMware.

With more than 25 years of experience in leading and growing developer-facing businesses, Nielsen has held several key executive roles at some of the world's most successful developer-facing software companies including BEA, Microsoft, and Oracle.

"Tod brings proven leadership to Heroku along with a strong track record of success in leading developer-facing businesses and building developer communities that will take Heroku products and services to an even larger scale in the market," said Oren Teich, chief operating officer, Heroku. "His experience in leading some of the world's top application developer businesses and teams will undoubtedly take Heroku's technology and services to a new level of commercial growth. I am thrilled to have him join the team."

"Heroku defined what it means for developers to be highly productive and achieve friction free deployment for the cloud," said Tod Nielsen, chief executive officer, Heroku. "The Heroku team has built an impressive platform with a compelling value proposition - I'm excited to join the team and help accelerate our momentum as we continue to shape and transform the cloud computing market."

Background on Tod Nielsen

• Prior to VMware, Nielsen served as president and chief executive officer of Borland Software Corporation; senior vice president, Marketing and Global Sales Support for Oracle Corporation; and was responsible for BEA's worldwide marketing strategy and operations, as well as research and development operations.
  

• Prior to BEA, Nielsen spent 12 years with Microsoft in various executive roles, including General Manager of Database and Developer Tools and as vice president of Microsoft's Platform group.