Flow Into Spring - Episode #26 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places; unidentified voices are shown as "Speaker N". Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 26th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the first week of 2011. This episode is titled Flow Into Spring. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, your cloud community experts. And I'm your host, Jason Atwood. And joining me, the co-host, for the first time in 2011 is Justin. Justin, how are you doing today? Good. Thanks. Feeling happy? Yeah, excellent. Not even close to grumpy. So everything that's not grumpy. Excellent. Good stuff. So we got an agenda today. We're going to talk about what's going on. your blog post which I'd love for you to go over and tell us about because it's pretty on topic for what happened moments later. We're also going to talk about the Apple's new app store which ties right into your blog post and talk about maybe a Dell acquisition and how Wikipedia is using OpenStack. So an interesting little side note on one of my predictions for 2011, which is that the open source movement for cloud computing would get some sort of big names behind it. Looks like Wikipedia is a big name. So I'd say I'm one for five already. When's this Apple going to buy Salesforce? Never. Okay. And then we'll finish up with our Cloud Focus app pick of the week. Sounds good? Sounds great. Let's get, kick us off with telling us about your pod, your blog post. I do it every week. blog post?

Justin Edelstein: You do do that very often. It's kind of my thing. It's sort of your thing. It is. Yeah, so I wrote a post called Goodbye Disk, Hello World. And it was all about the emphasis of application marketplaces popping up. Apple just released theirs, as you mentioned, today, which is interesting. I released the blog post yesterday. I had no knowledge that they were doing that today, but I could sort of make myself seem smart and say I did. This also sort of stemmed from the fact that you and I have, over the past couple of weeks, talked quite a bit about Google's app marketplace and the App Exchange. We always make our picks of the week from places like that. So I thought it warranted a blog post. So the crux of the blog post is all about how you can have cloud platforms, whether it be Google Apps or force.com, and be able to install with clicks, not disks, applications that are pre-configured to integrate with the platform that you are using. So if you wanted to, you know, you're using salesforce.com for sales automation and marketing, and then you wanted to all of of a sudden use Salesforce for project management, you can go to their app marketplace, browse, look around, see ratings from other customers of salesforce.com, see how they rated it, some commenting, and then with a few clicks, install it into your instance and have it pre-integrated with your Salesforce and be up and running. And I thought that that was a interesting new paradigm for customers to browse and for IT departments to deploy applications into their existing environments?

03:35 Jason Atwood: It is certainly, I mean, we've been talking about it for at least since beginning this podcast, so sometime last year. Which is, it is the wave of the future, not the past. Software is going to be deployed, whether it be internally or externally through these mechanisms. the success of the Google App Marketplace, which we talked about before, Apple's, even iTunes, which didn't have applications. But the idea that I could just go click on them, start it with iTunes, and be able to click on an album, or see an album, see ratings, and click on it, and have it instantly, almost instantly. And I think it goes right into today's news, which is that literally, you must have spurned them on. They said it was going to be 60 days after they announced It didn't come. They pushed it off in another, I think, 30 days, but earlier this week it was rumored that it was coming and basically Apple released in the new version of Snow Leopard, so you have to run Snow Leopard, they released their, what is called the App Store.

Jason Atwood: It's the Mac App Store, so it actually sits on your desktop, but if you have been using an iPad, an iTouch, an iPhone, which one of the, I don't know, 40 million people on the iOS platform, you understand what this is in that it has applications that you can click on easily and download and install. And so we actually, since it came out today, I installed it this morning and been playing around and both purchased new stuff and saw how it reacted to stuff I had already seen, or already owned, and pretty good. I would say right off the bat, it recognized some of the things I had installed. I had, actually one of the things I did is I had Evernote in my dock and then I went in and it said buy Evernote. Now Evernote just happens to be free. It was one of my Cloud Focus app picks of the week. But I was wondering, okay, what's going to happen? So you click on an application in there to buy it. You have to hit a username, password, your iTunes account and then it shows up on your dock, kind of like, very much like on iOS.

Jason Atwood: It shows up and it kind of shows you it downloading. And then when it's done downloading, it's there for you to use. So it's as easy as you possibly can imagine. But I already had Evernote in my dock. And I was thinking, what's going to happen? So we were sitting there playing and I clicked on Evernote, buy Evernote, whatever, it came down. And then it showed the new Evernote being built sort of right below it. And all of a sudden, when it was done, the old Evernote dock icon disappeared and the new one popped up and I was like, done exactly correctly. Clicked on it and it was the same app. I was logged in. It got all the permissioning. It was perfectly done. So congrats on doing that very well, because I was worried that am I going to have to redownload everything? How's it going to work? And now, because it's connected in, since this application knows that I have these apps installed from the cloud, all updates can come through one application. That's before you had to open up each application, which some you open up all the time, but some you might not open up once a month. So then now they'll all show up in the Mac App Store, and you'll see all your updates.

06:37 Jason Atwood: just like on the iOS platform, you'll be able to click and it'll update them all together. So great, great.

Justin Edelstein: It also uses your iTunes account to pay for the software, correct? Yes.

Jason Atwood: So whatever credit card you have there, it's good.

Justin Edelstein: And if you have gift cards that someone gives you for the holidays just recently and you don't want to buy an album, you can go buy some software.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, so you can buy software, now books and albums, movies, TV.

Justin Edelstein: Created a nice little marketplace for themselves. It's been pretty good. Very well done.

Jason Atwood: categories, top charts, all that, great for browsing. The rumors are that developers are very happy. Developers are going to go for quantity over price. So they want to get a lot of people to buy them at full price. Volume. Sorry, volume over, just having a high price.

Justin Edelstein: Just like the iPhone apps, a lot of them are just $0.99 or $1.99 as opposed to $40.

Jason Atwood: It'll be interesting to see now as apps come out that are considered full desktop applications, I'm air quoting, well full desktop applications, what would their price point be, and I'm sure someone will do a spreadsheet and say, OK, Angry Birds for the desktop is x, Angry Birds for their iPad is y, and Angry Birds for the iPhone is z. What's that relationship? Why? Why are we pricing things?

Justin Edelstein: It'd be nice if they were universal, like truly, truly universal. Like Evernote, for example, runs on all three platforms.

Jason Atwood: But the application is different for every platform.

Justin Edelstein: But not for the, well they're different, but the iPhone, iTouch, and iPad are universal apps. So it's one app that you're downloading. But not on the Mac. But not on the Mac, right? But wouldn't it be nice if it could be? Well, there are different applications on, I guess, different operating systems. But still, it would be cool if they could

Jason Atwood: figure that out somehow. I think that's probably the end game is where those two is come back together. Basically, as space gets bigger on these, because it's basically a space thing and a complexity, but.

Justin Edelstein: Outer space?

Jason Atwood: A space on your hard drive or your SSD. The thing that I think would be more interesting is if you buy a license to use one app on your iPhone, it also gives you the license to use that, not that same app, but the app that is connected to it on the Mac. So you could buy the Mac app called something, and then it would come with the remote that you could use it for. And so I think that will come. Again, this is early days. They figured out a lot, and they built a lot in. But early days, great stuff. I mean, I think you installed it. I don't know if you've. I did. I haven't played with it yet. It looks really, really cool. And I've already bought Angry Birds and Chopper 2. So two games that I probably would never play on my desktop, but because I could click, click, click, came right in. And I also think for other people, I'm more excited for support for me and my family, who I've convinced to all go to Macs. Now when it comes to, you need to get this application, you need to get stuff at Expander to unzip your things,

09:42 Jason Atwood: right, I no longer have to be like, okay, go to this thing, click on it, go to the DMG, unload the DMG, take it, put it into your applications folder, I can say, go on Mac, type in stuff at Expander, I can probably even send them a link, and then they just hit click and it downloads and it's maintained for them. And I'll go back over to my mother's house and find out she has applications from four years ago she never updated. So that's all good stuff. What else we got on the agenda today? We also have a little purchase, which is Dell on the buying spree. Starts off 2011 with buying a security as a service company. Which is semi interesting, only in the cloud world, because they're getting into this. I guess this is also SaaS. But the cloud apps and cloud security, this one happened to just keep all of this called SecureWorks, and it happened to keep all your security services in the cloud and as a service that you can buy. Again, they bought Boomi, which was the data integrator in the cloud last year, and now a security as a service. So interesting to see. My guess is this is just the start of many, many as-a-service purchases here. Yeah, it's like expanding its IT as a

Justin Edelstein: service realm, right? These are just things that your IT department internally would take care of and Dell now offers them as a service to you. Right, so

Jason Atwood: they're going, the suit manufacturer also has umbrellas and hats and jackets. So it's like, you know, you come to us to buy suits but But we also know you need a hat, and you need an umbrella, and you need a jacket. So it's here for you if you want it. That certainly is security as a service that's right in there, and certainly integration of data services to the cloud. That's also right in there. So yeah, they're in talking to CIOs, CTOs, and going, listen, we've got all these things. Again, what will it mean for this company? And will they become the bigger, better thing? Or will it just be this little chicklet on the Dell slide?

Justin Edelstein: We should also mention that Dell recently also purchased Compellent, which is another sort of virtualization storage product that they are now just stockpiling with acquisitions of companies that help to move other companies to the cloud. Here's our integrator, here's our virtualization storage, here's our IT threat security management. So it looks like they're poised to make a move, or are already making a move to grab

Jason Atwood: some enterprise business. Great, because they sell the enterprise, so it's good for them. I don't know how they're doing the desktop arena now. They're still, do they see all these upcomings as a threat?

Justin Edelstein: Well again, to me Dell, I mean they have their consumer products that are probably doing just fine, but I think that they also do very well selling hundreds of thousands of desktops to large enterprises at extreme markdowns. So this is just part of, you know, we're already in there selling this enormous financial institution, 50,000 desktops every two years. Let's sell them this.

12:56 Jason Atwood: God, I wish I worked at a company that bought a new desktop every two years back in the day. I think we were on at least six-year-old hardware. And certainly where HP was, I think HP's taken a hit, but that's all not very cloud-related, so let's move on. Next up, we have actually kind of an interesting story, because it's talking about Wikipedia and their plans of using OpenStack. So in my blog post, I guess, last week, two weeks ago, it talked about 2011 predictions. One of the things I said was I think that the open source movement, which has been around for a long time, had great success with things like Firefox, which was then bought out and turned into Mozilla and whatever, or Mozilla was and turned into Firefox, and Apache, and tons of other software that's probably sitting around and dealing.

Justin Edelstein: Apache, Google Wave Apache. Oh, very good. Apache Wave. You did it.

Jason Atwood: Got it in there. You brought the Wave into the podcast. So then I was saying that you need to have some major players get in on board for other major players to sort of say, oh yeah, we'll use some of that open source cloud computing technologies, which in some ways don't fit well together because cloud computing technologies are usually hosted by somebody, meaning you license to them, but yet open source is free. So it gets kind of strange. But here's a good story of Wikipedia and in a blog by Wikipedia saying that they were going to move on to using OpenStack, which is RackSpaces. RackSpaces is a dedicated hosting provider who's gotten into cloud computing. They bought a couple of big players, like Jungle Disk and I don't know if it's called Meebo, or they turned them into cloud files and cloud servers and all these other actually badly named applications. But they were in the business of really hosting hardware. Side note, I actually run a server with them, and they're very, very good. But they went and said, we're going to put some of our technologies that we've bought and we've been building and open source them. And they open sourced them in something called OpenStack, which is an open source cloud computing technology stack for building out your infrastructure. So again, kind of a strange mix of strange bedfellows. But in that, Wikipedia is now saying, which is a massive site, probably one of top 10 sites on the internet in terms of hits, that they're going to start to use this for their virtualization, for their hosting.

Justin Edelstein: They're using it for testing, aren't they?

Jason Atwood: To start, yeah. But it's a massive, I think it's a big story, and again, kicks off what I would say one of my five predictions.

Justin Edelstein: Well, it's an open source product using an open source product.

Jason Atwood: And then building out of cloud computing technologies. It's awesome. It's good stuff. Sounds good. Yeah. So that's a

Justin Edelstein: Almost too good to be true. It is.

Jason Atwood: It is. Again, that's what's strange about open source is that it's usually open sourcing the code. And usually cloud computing technologies are not about the code. They're about the service. They're about the licensing. They're about the expandability. They're about the multi-tenancy, all that. virtualization. Open source is about code. So this is kind of a mix of those two worlds. And interesting, great on for Rackspace for doing it. Good on for Wikipedia for taking a big step and sort of putting a name behind something that I hadn't heard a lot of people put names behind yet. And then there's the last little bit, which we will not get into depth. I think we should probably do it next week when you've had a chance to digest. But I tweeted yesterday, and you tweeted, and then I found and then read, which is that Salesforce has released the notes of their Spring 11 release. And they've already set the timeline. So if you're a Salesforce customer, you should have already seen the you're going to get, you're org is going to be updated on these days. But they released the big PDF. I think it's 90 pages.

16:51 Jason Atwood: And it outlines all the different changes that are behind it. HUGO VAN ROSSUM.

Justin Edelstein: Not as big as they used to be. JONATHAN BERI.

Jason Atwood: In terms of pages, or just in terms of releases? HUGO VAN ROSSUM. So, both? Possibly.

Justin Edelstein: This is the smallest timeframe.

Jason Atwood: If you look between the release of winter and... I remember them being like 180 pages. Really? Yeah. I think you see that between the biggest timeframe is usually summer to winter is usually the biggest. Because of the time, I think this only has two scrum cycles in there. I think, two or three. The other ones I think either have four. So, this would be the smallest release cycle. A lot of changes in the timeframe. smallest release cycle. A lot of chatter in it. Not going to give everything away. A lot of chatter. A lot of great features in chatter. And some really, I mean, just lots of good stuff. I mean, nothing groundbreaking. A lot of renaming. Actually, they renamed the process visualizer to force.com flow.

Justin Edelstein: That's been renamed, but I think now it's going to be available to people.

Jason Atwood: It's now officially.

Justin Edelstein: You still have to ask for it, though.

Jason Atwood: There's a lot of good stuff. Chrome, Chrome fully supported. That's good. It looks like they're turning on. And again, we'll go over this next week in depth, but kind of wanted to give a taste. It looks like they're turning on a lot of stuff that was, you could turn this on if you want. No, no, no. Now it's turned on, and you can obviously chatter something that's already kind of coming on. But there's a lot of little features that, as I read through, it's like, this will be turned on automatically. This too will be turned on automatically. This too will be turned on automatically. And almost like, yeah, we've decided that it's good enough, that everybody can have it. and no one's complained that it's there, so we're going to turn it on and make it part of the core product, which is always what Salesforce struggles with, right? They build new features. They don't want to make people use them because that might disrupt their system and their software, but they also want them to use them. So it's like this back and forth of, hey, there's great stuff out there. Please use it. But if companies don't want to use it or don't know that it exists, and I think Salesforce probably struggles with, are they not using it because they don't know it exists and they're not using it because they don't want to turn it on.

Jason Atwood: I don't think Salesforce knows because they can't. There's to them when they look at the feature being turned on or off they can't tell whether did you know did Arcus not turn on meeting request cloud scheduler because they didn't know it exists or because they just didn't want to use it. But so it looks like a lot of stuff is being turned on and maybe they'll just beg for forgiveness. They sort of did this with chatter. They said okay everybody's getting it and then you were able to turn it off And they even sent me a, I turned it off in one org. It only had one user in it. And they sent me a note saying, why did you turn it off? Why did you, could you take our server and tell us why did you turn it off chatter? And I was like, because there's only one person in the org, it doesn't make any sense to have chatter in one org. It really didn't. I tried to come up with a test case. DAN HOLEVOETT-GOMEZ-MARTINETTI.

Justin Edelstein: It makes absolutely no sense. Sorry, I just opened a bottle of soda. It makes absolutely no sense to have chatter in an org with one user.

Jason Atwood: Two users maybe. But uh... Even that's a hard sell. But uh, you have a group of two people. But yeah, one was tough. So, but my guess is, and my gut feeling is that they did, what they projected people to be upset about with turning on Chatter was not as big as it was. So now they're gonna, I think they're gonna trend to more turn things on.

20:09 Justin Edelstein: I know I had a bunch of, we had clients, but clients that I was specifically working with that called me like that next day, like, What is this thing? Where did my search box go?

Jason Atwood: Yeah, that was a bigger change. And that's the other thing. If you want to turn on functionality, turn on functionality, but don't connect it to something else, that is a major change. Changing your search box classification is big. If Google put the search box somewhere else tomorrow, the world would implode. But for them, I think that was it. And I actually like it where it is. I think it's better than it was. But it was a big change for most people. All right, so that wraps up our big agenda, or semi-big agenda. And now we can go on to the favorite part of my show, our show, Cloud Focus Weekly. Whose show is this? It's a show for everybody. All right. It's your show. Okay. It's our Cloud Focus at pick of the week. And I'm gonna start off with you, and I'm gonna give you back your Cloud Focus at pick of the week that I almost stole from you last week. You really did.

Justin Edelstein: You almost stole it, but then I stole it back. This is a Google Chrome extension from Appirio called force.com logins. So it's totally free, just before you ask. What's the cost? Free. So it's free. Zero.

Jason Atwood: So how much do I have to pay for it? Zero justice. So if I were to put down a credit card, you would charge me zero. Okay. Okay. So... Wait, wait, wait. How many euros? Zero. Okay, zero euros. Conversion rate. The conversion rate is zero.

Justin Edelstein: So what this does is for folks like ourselves who tend to work with a lot of different Salesforce orgs or instances, we have a lot of them, whether they be sandboxes, developer boxes, production instances for ourselves and for our clients. You might have a sticky note somewhere that has all your usernames and passwords, maybe a note in your Outlook or in your Evernote perhaps or on a Google Wave. Force.com logins extension for Chrome stores these logins for you in an extension. So it puts a little button at the top of Chrome. It allows you to group them. So you can group, you know, sandboxes together or maybe different client logins together. You can group them together. And you can then, you know, you add your account information to the extension and they all just show up and you can open them either in a new tab or a new window by clicking a button. So they're labeled and then you just sort of click them, you can search through them. A great time saver for anyone who has more than like three logins to Salesforce and you don't want to remember all your usernames and passwords somewhere. So this was written by some of the guys in the Imperial Japan office. I don't want to butcher his name so I'm not going to say it. But there's essentially a link that we'll put up on the podcast page on the blog, blog.arcasinc.com.

23:16 Jason Atwood: Is it a podcast page or a blog?

Justin Edelstein: It's a blog that has the podcast link. Okay, alright.

Jason Atwood: Sometimes we get confused. You get confused.

Justin Edelstein: So yeah, it's a nice product and helps save some time jumping from org to org. You don't have to bookmark things or do anything like that. It sits in this little Chrome extension and with Chrome in the upcoming Salesforce release being extremely supported, or I shouldn't, instead of extremely officially supported, even though it works now, you'll be happy to have this. Good one. I almost picked it last week.

Jason Atwood: I will say, I'm not going to make it my pick of the week, but I will say for other people looking for the same type of functionality, although a little bit different, and if you're on a Mac, for, there's one called Trapdoor. I haven't made it my pick. I actually looked to see if I had. I had not. So I'll throw it out there as a semi-pick, which is if you're looking for the same functionality on a Mac, the only, couple differences is it stores in your keychain, but it allows you to open up into any browser. So you can actually say I want this production org to always open in Firefox, I want this one to always open in Chrome, I want this one to always open in Safari. Kind of cool, but this one is definitely great. I actually have, I started to use it, but it's one of those things I forget about and then I forget that I even store them in there. And the keychain on the Mac does a good enough job of remembering all my username and passwords that I just have to type my first name and then literally 100 will show up and I can figure out which one I'm supposed to log into. So good one. $0. OK. I'm not going to repeat myself. Excellent. So mine is going to be not such a, it is actually a brand new product, just released today, sometime around 8 o'clock in the morning. But it is sort of a son of another product that I think we might have picked. And it's cloud related because it comes from the cloud and talks to the cloud. But it is Twitter, I was going to say Tweety, Twitter for the Mac only available through the Mac App Store. So for all the reasons I just said why you should be downloading and installing the new version of Snow Leopard, which includes the Mac App Store, this is one of those reasons. It is free. It is a replacement of or an upgrade to Tweety. So for those of you who don't know, the developers behind Tweety for the iPhone actually went and built an OS X app, the company was bought out by Twitter. Obviously it was one of the better ones, they said let's buy them. Then Twitter released, changed it from Tweety for the iPhone to Twitter for the iPhone and iPad, which is a great app. I use it, is that the one you use to do your tweeting on the iPhone? Tweety, yeah. Yeah, Twitter, now.

Justin Edelstein: Well, now Twitter, yes.

Jason Atwood: So for us who use the desktop app, who paid for the desktop app, I think it was like 19 We all thought, well, when are they going to upgrade the one on the desktop? Well, here it comes. And it comes in the form of the Mac App Store. It is, again, free. It basically does everything that Tweedy did. It's a little bit more new looking. It's got some better usability stuff. It still does all the notifications. It's controllable. You can have lots of accounts. I have them controlled by. They'll send notifications to either Growl or something like that, or on your desktop, or in your menu bar. Again, just a really good app, free, quick to download, and gives you a reason to get into the Mac App Store. I would put as sub-pics that I also bought Angry Birds for the Mac. So for those of you like Justin, who spends 500% of his time on Angry Birds, you can now do it on your Mac when you're not in front of your iPhone or iPad.

27:02 Justin Edelstein: That is such not a cloud pic of the week.

Jason Atwood: Not Angry Birds, but Tweety is. So that's it. That's my Cod Pick of the Week. If you want to find out more about our picks and read up on our blog posts, which we've been talking about, it's blog.arkusinc.com. You can subscribe by RSS. You can follow the company, which also talks about our podcasts and what we're doing and up to, at arkusinc.com. That's A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C. That's on Twitter. Twitter.com slash Jason M. Atwood is myself. Twitter.com slash Justin Edelstein. Just Edelstein, sorry. Someone already had Justin, right?

Justin Edelstein: No, it wouldn't fit. Oh, it's too long. Yeah. Bummer.

Jason Atwood: So at just Edelstein, leave off the in, because he's incredible. Bad. And you can also follow us on Facebook, Facebook.com slash Arcus Inc. And the best way to follow the podcast, if you want to subscribe to it, is go to iTunes, type in Cloud Focus Weekly, click on Subscribe. It will come down to you. anytime we publish a new episode. And we will review there. We love it. We like nice reviews. Please don't leave nasty reviews. You'll make us cry. So until next week, next time, enjoy those cloudy days.