With a B - Episode #122 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. Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:47 Jason Atwood: But well. our blog post of the week, which is Comparing Data Loaders for Salesforce, which has already gotten some feedback from friends of Arkus and blog readers around. So we'll talk about that. And then, is Salesforce pivoting away from social and the social enterprise? As the DNET article will discuss. Maybe we have an opinion. And then Apple's earnings were interesting, but what was really more interesting was how much they've taken over the sort of messaging space. So we're gonna talk about that. And then we will make our cloud focus app pick of the weeks and that will be good. So let's start off with the blog post of the week. written by one of the members here at Arkus in his weekly rotation called Comparing Data Loaders for Salesforce, which is on blog.arkusinc.com

Justin Edelstein: And which that you can connect to Salesforce and load data, CSVs, or in some cases other sources. Right.

Jason Atwood: So he looked at three of them and he kind of did a little what they're not good for and then gave a little. So he looked at Jitterbit, dataloader.io. Informatica data order. So three big ones. There are more out there than this. This is not the only ones out there. Yeah, not the definitive list. Jitterbit is one that has been floating around, I would say has in the in the circles has gotten more more and more buzz. I've been hearing more and more about Jitterbit. In fact, I just got their news announcement that Jitterbit

Justin Edelstein: Well, I've used three others than this but they're not well I've used others as and your sources and your very light scripting.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, they're basically dumbed down ETL tools, ETL, extract, transfer, like what you hear, Informatic.a, Cast Iron, Jitterbit, Pervasive are all in the ETL. tool, space, there's others, Abinishu, there's someone was mentioning the other day, Talend, oh Talend, there's another one someone else was mentioning, I was like, oh yeah, I kind of remember them, but basically pulling data from one source, putting it into another, and then doing it repeatedly, doing it nightly, doing it through millions and millions of records. that are all done with things called maps and connections and and really where they get there where they make their money is that they have all these built-in connections so you know they like to say we have 300 built-in connections that means we can connect 300 different sources and a source being Salesforce a source being Excel source being Access a source being FTP FTP a source being Sugar CRM a source being dynamics, those all sources and move the data between them.

04:33 Jason Atwood: We happen to do work with a lot of them, with some degree, some are great, some are not, but these are all the sort of, so these are all kind of like those big, which costs somewhere $5,000 a month to run. These are all kind of the free versions. This is the free version.

Justin Edelstein: The light version, the one that you would download if you felt like playing with some of these, you could download them today and just start playing.

Jason Atwood: So I mean, I agree. I'm generally the only one I've even played with a little bit because of those other big ones, I have developer licenses to them. So when I want to do data loading. And I want something a little bit bigger. I just go to the tool that I have a developer license to and I can use. And I use that. In fact, I was doing it the other day for a FoxPro database. They sent over a FoxPro database. FoxPro is the first database I ever worked with. They sent over the FoxPro database thing. I tried to open it on the Mac and it failed. I tried to open it on Windows. It failed. And I said, let me try this ETL tool. It's right open. I was like, oh. And then I just.

Jason Atwood: I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not. I connected up the Salesforce, made sure it was going into a custom field, and it went whoosh! I thought, ooh, so nice. So this was nice about, the thing about the data loader that's not very good is it doesn't have a very repeatable.

Justin Edelstein: It like Windows Scheduler right and have it run in a command line prompt or something along those lines and I mean that's basically it you can map field to field and you can't take the same schema save schemas you can save the map sure the mapping Yeah, but you can't take one field and shoot it to two right you You can't do like complicated upserts. You can't do relationship type data with it. You can a little bit with the upsert function in the data loader, because you can give it like an external ID of a parent record and it'll relate it for you, which is nice, but you can't do very complicated things.

Jason Atwood: And yeah, so it has lots of limitation. You should go, if you are at all work with data, I was just checking these out, because again, free is the right number. And they do give you a sense of like, oh, this is the beginning of something. So then you can see, oh, if I like this tool, I can test it. There's a lot of these ETL tools. These big ones. This is like the freemium version. Yeah, you don't get. There's no freemium version that I know of. Cast iron like I can't I don't think it's a cast iron downloadable play with me thing now there is a freemium informatica There is the data loader. Yep. There it is. There runs right inside of Salesforce to informatica known as one of the Sort of best known in the Salesforce space because they're very big in the sales force.

Jason Atwood: Yes, so that's Some of these are downloadable installs like jitter bit

Justin Edelstein: Some of them informatica is you know runs actually can run right inside your Salesforce instance Yep, so cool. Check them out.

07:34 Jason Atwood: You go see what we wrote about them the good the bad and the Not so good just to let you know if your podcast listener the order of which

Justin Edelstein: They're written is not the order of their importance Yeah, this is not like a ranking like we like this one better than this one better than this one. It was just a Here's three, here's how they compare to the data loader, not to each other.

Jason Atwood: They've had some comments. We had some comments. From some friends. Some friends, friends, but friends who work at some of these companies who might not like that they were not the first, so do your own math. All right, next up.

Justin Edelstein: I'm gonna answer this in one word, you go.

Jason Atwood: Is Salesforce pivoting from its social enterprise, wait,

Justin Edelstein: Don't answer it. Answer in one word. No, let me, let me,

Jason Atwood: This is an article. I answer the question, then you go? No, because I wanna set it up. Oh, fine, you set it up, then I'll answer it, you go. So this is an article on CDNet. It popped up this morning actually. I saw it in my daily Zite read, still loves Zite. I'd pick Zite every day if I could.

Justin Edelstein: Article was written yesterday. Right, but it popped up. Your Zite's daylight. I don't read it. Your Zite's a daylight. It's a read Zite a night.

Jason Atwood: Your lovey W would Zite your daylight. No, I don't read Zite at night. I read the site in the morning. So anyway, so basically they're making a thing to saying that they're moving their social, their part of their marketing. And they base that a little bit off the website, which I don't know if it's a great way to say whether they're marketing or not, but moving it away from talking so much about the social and social enterprise, moving it back to sort of the things that sort of have, you know, they've been talking about for a long time, much more cloud, no hardware, you know, no software, sort of. the traditional Salesforce marketing, and they're making the assumption, or ZDNet is, I am not, that is because the social, I thought it was interesting, they're saying, social and social enterprise is so much more about the culture of the company who's doing it, that it doesn't take with all people, and if you don't, If that's not your culture, then when you say enterprise, it's almost it's a turn off like, you know, in those magazines I read, like turn off social enterprise.

Jason Atwood: Z in that magazine. So they make a kind of good point. What do you think? Do you think Salesforce is pivoting away from the social enterprise? Yes. Oh, so tell me why.

Justin Edelstein: Was that a surprise answer for you?

Jason Atwood: I didn't know which way you were going to go. You didn't know? No, you didn't surprise me because you didn't know which way. You know why?

Justin Edelstein: Because Salesforce pivots every two years. This is a true statement. Okay. They are marketing pivots from left to back to right to straight to backwards to forwards every few years. Is their technology mix going to pivot from? focusing on social to something else going back to the core, likely not so much, but their bread and butter and where they still make money right now is still in being a cloud computing company first and a having social enterprise capabilities as part of that cloud computing spectrum, right? So the whole marketing thing about like being the social enterprise company For them almost doesn't make sense. It's like we're cloud computing company. We provide cloud computing solutions. No hardware. No software we offer you services and One of those services is the marketing cloud and if you want to get into it, it's all about social and connectivity and this and that and the other.

11:14 Justin Edelstein: And listening and buddy media and the reading six. They have the buddy media, they have the reading six. They're not going to go away from it, but to go out there and be very boastful and loud about business is social and really just hit that home and talk about that as the big thing when there are still plenty of companies out there that don't think that cloud is the big thing. you're missing the boat a little bit. So I know we've talked about it like 10, 12 years ago and they're out there and saying, no software, no hardware, SaaS, making acronyms up, making up terms, cloud computing, making these things up. That's kind of where they are now with the businesses, social, enterprise, whatever, however they want to phrase it. To me, I think their bread is still buttered with we're the cloud computing company, we are the trusted cloud computing company, we're the enterprise cloud computing company, and what do you want to do in the cloud?

Justin Edelstein: Oh, you want to collaborate in the cloud? Great. You want to do marketing in the cloud? In the cloud? Great. You want to do sales in the cloud? Awesome. That's what we do. You want to do service in the cloud? Great. We're the best at it. You know, that kind of thing. and social's gonna be always a part of the story as far as they keep going with chatter as far as they keep buying things like Radiance 6 and Buddy Media they're gonna keep tying into social that paradigm of how people communicate and collaborate with each other has kind of just just I don't feel like it's just started, but it's really catching the momentum, right? How people communicate, how people are connected, how their products are connected, all that stuff is really just starting.

Justin Edelstein: So I don't know if they're going to get totally away from its social enterprise rap, but it's going to be part of a bigger thing. It's not going to be the thing, because they can't totally abandon Service Cloud. But service cloud has ties into social right it has all those ties same thing with the marketing cloud clearly That's that's a big hedge on Social and marketing and Facebook and Twitter and listening and all that stuff so that's my take on it I think the end the short answer the one-word answer is yes Salesforce is pivoting from its social enterprise rap, but no the tech technology that they're providing and going to be doing as little subsets of their overarching we are still, the cloud computing enterprise, the big bad wolf in the room when it comes to cloud,

Jason Atwood: That's where they're going to hit the mark. Yeah, I mean I've never loved or never felt that it hit home as much as I remember sitting in and listening to one of the probably 50 times I've heard Mark Penny out speak and I remember being at the one where it was in New York, it was like five years ago and it was one where they brought up the author of The Big Switch.

14:20 Justin Edelstein: That was a great one. I was sitting right next to you. Yes, you were.

Jason Atwood: Nicholas Carr. There you go. Very good on the name call. I was just about to say that. And I remember when Nicholas Carr got up and talked about the big switch and talked about shifting of trends in industry and in the way we do business and the movement from individual, everybody having their own power plant next to the thing to moving to power as something you just plug in the wall and moving and comparing that, comparing and contrasting that to the cloud computing revolution. I remember that just being a big and, you know, mind blown.

Justin Edelstein: It's like putting the jack on the bottom. That book was mind-blowing. And it's funny. But business and social is in mind-bl is mind blowing.

Jason Atwood: What you want, but they're in the social thing and it's a way of communication and it doesn't feel as natural as, do you know how we used to do this and now we do it this way? That's what cloud computing is. Like it's so simple and so bare bones and so true that you almost can't argue with it, right? There are no power plants, there are no manufacturing arms that all have their own windmills next to them anymore because they can get it from the grid. We've taken something and commoditized it. computing platforms, SaaS, platforms of service, software as a service, these are all becoming commoditized thing. Email is commoditized at this point. It has almost no value. It's gone down from something you would pay. I remember when we worked at that company, that the big company, I remember they threw out numbers of how many email servers they had.

Jason Atwood: Right and how much they paid for all that and how much architecture and infrastructure they had to run all that email it was you know massive Now in that organization they probably still do but that stuff is getting less and less and less because it's becoming something you can just Buy off the What were we paying for? Oh, we paid like $35 per. User per month from email and then you paid extra ten dollars for that space. Forget all that. I'm talking about like when we were doing application development

Justin Edelstein: And our developers were like we currently use x, what was it, MIPS?

Jason Atwood: Oh, yeah, it's a it's a the term they use for computing

Justin Edelstein: Power in a, on a, it was like a big deal. Yeah. How many minutes we were able to like cut down the amount of the amount of MIPS that our applications were using. Of course, use less MIPS.

Jason Atwood: Use less MIPS. Right. Because you're running a huge deal. It was like mainframe information processing something. It was a huge deal. It was like, we just saved

Justin Edelstein: This amount of money because we cut down from. I'm just making numbers of 100 MIPS to 50 MIPS. We were charged back for MIPS. They really, really goodly charged the business unit for MIPS.

17:25 Jason Atwood: So like our, what we're talking about is our website, they firmly worked at the website, not just some marketing website, had functionality built into it and that functionality ran on, believe it or not, lots of hardware. Well, ran on mainframes. And those mainframes would run that technology. and and they would charge back the business. So the business who owned the website was charged back for the MIPS that they use. So, yes. So anyway. Yeah, we went there. Yeah, we went to MIPS.

Justin Edelstein: When's the last time you heard MIPS? Yeah, this went from social enterprise marketing to MIPS in about four minutes.

Jason Atwood: I was just gonna look up MIPS. Ha ha ha ha ha. Good luck with the spelling. No, MIPS. Oh, and millions of destructions per second.

Justin Edelstein: There you go. How many MIPS can we cut down? Yeah, what's the MIPS? Because that saved us money. Anyway.

Jason Atwood: So, while I'm not sure that that one changing the website is an indicator of that, I think... They have many markedly and they're that was a little bit more meaning to everybody. I think what you talked about like you should be the marketing when they talk about a platform software, easy to get into, scalable, platform to run these parts of your business and many more parts of your business that you haven't even thought of and you can do it all in one place for cheaply and you can go up and down as you need. That still resonates with every one of our clients. So moving on to things that also resonate with everybody. Apple announced some earnings. Let's not talk about the earnings. No one cares about the I'm saying it's become getting there because in their earnings they announced who cares about the Apple's earnings.

Jason Atwood: But one of the things that came out of it for us cloud computing people was that they send, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the users send over. 2 billion with the B, iMessages per day on the iOS ecosystem. Amazing. 2 billion iMessage a day. That's like in under two years, right? iMessage has been about two years. I don't know if it's even two. It was beta until Mountainland. Well, no.

Justin Edelstein: IMessage on the... Devices well, yeah, I don't know when it came out. Let's see. I mean I love I message I love it to the point where it almost bothers me. I think you feel the same way maybe that I don't agree with you the most things but okay I don't even like texting with people that aren't on an iOS device anymore I it like it's annoying to see it green and not blue I'm like, why is this green? I don't like this. I don't know if you got it. I don't know if it got there. I don't like this. Are you so happy when you text somebody and it starts to green? And then it goes to blue. And then it goes to blue and you're like, oh. I love it so much. And I love picking up conversations in my messenger on my laptop and then closing that and then picking it back up on the phone.

20:36 Justin Edelstein: I'm heading up on my iPad mini. I just love being able to go from device to device to device and having the state be there. It all goes through the iCloud and it's all just the whole conversation stored. I just love it. I can't get enough of iMessage of these two billion. I've sent one billion.

Jason Atwood: I love it. Yeah, I will say it is. There are quirks to it and there's things that I don't but it's like taking texting. You say taking texting. It's texting 2.0 That's what it is. Sure. I wish they just sold it like that They should call it texting 2.0 because it takes texting and it does all the stuff that you like Why doesn't texting like okay texting from 10 years ago? I get it, but this is texting 2.0 So it has re-receipt, it has delivery, it has, you can see people typing in real time. So you know, is that other person actually there? Maybe it's time to pick up the phone call, maybe it's not. It has grouping that actually works better. Device agnostic. Device agnostic, it works on anything you can be.

Jason Atwood: I still think the grouping is a little screwy. The grouping, if you sent a group, if one person starts a group, it's okay. If the other person re-arranges that as another group of the same people but it's in a different order, then it starts a different group. It gets screwy. Yeah, and again, lots of stuff that's wrong with it. But I think that's very impressive. Two billion a day iMessages.

Justin Edelstein: The phone carriers must be pissed. Oh yeah, because it's total... Well, it's using their data. But I would shut off texting.

Jason Atwood: I would literally... Because everybody in the world I want to talk to... Because they charge still per text message?

Justin Edelstein: And you'd think that that price, I think it's like 8 cents to send one and 2 cents to get one which is so dumb.

Jason Atwood: You're getting something and you're paying for it because somebody decided to send you something. Like, imagine being paid for getting mail.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, it's like, oh, thanks for sending me that thing. I have to pay for it now. Thanks for sending me, hey, where are you? Yeah. So kudos to Apple we you know obviously use the data component of your of your service to send an iMessage because it's going over the the data network and not the Cellular part or the phone part or whatever. Yeah, it's tiny. I love it And I really just love the device part of it. I mean I love sitting at my laptop and getting an iMessage and just being able to answer it for my laptop without having to go to the phone. Right. And they've gotten it. I mean,

Jason Atwood: I've noticed it's not perfect, but it's close. If you're actually in one device and answering and sort of communicating one device, it knows not to tell the other devices that it's going. Totally. You're absolutely right. Because the first time- Not 100%. Well,

Justin Edelstein: The first time, you know, it'll buzz your phone. Right. Ooh, got an I-mess. You check, you say, oh, there it is. It's in my messages on my laptop. Start answering from there, and the phone stops buzzing.

Jason Atwood: I love it. Yeah, yeah, it's great. It is good. And the syncing, I'm syncing's a little weird, like if you're off your computer.

Justin Edelstein: Off an iPad for, like, let's say you go on a trip. I went on a trip. I had the iPad on airplane mode for a week. I, you know. get home, take it off, goes on to the Wi-Fi, and oh lord, it took a while to sink it all back together.

23:48 Jason Atwood: But it worked. I have a question for you. So, go on. Years ago, you picked WhatsApp. WhatsApp, I still use it. But has it come down or the same?

Justin Edelstein: Same, still use it because it's... Because you have a couple friends who are not on that. There's one friend who has a droid and... There's, I use it primarily for a five person group conversation. One of the, one of the people is on an Android phone.

Jason Atwood: So, so frustrating. Ever done that with like five, four, five people? I get mad at my,

Justin Edelstein: One of my friends, he just, he doesn't get that he can use iMessage. So he'll stay in WhatsApp and send me just a one to one WhatsApp. And I will, being the person I am, respond to his WhatsApp in iMessage. Oh yeah.

Jason Atwood: Like, get out of here. Well, I've done that. I've done that with chatter. I've responded to chatter with email. I'm like, I'm not, this is not a debt chatter. I'll just forward you this. Yeah, I'm gonna forward your chatter to me via email. All right, well. Let's get some pics. Let's get some pics. Let's do some CloudFocus app pick of the week.

Justin Edelstein: So, speaking of. Go for it. Tell me yours. I have phones and iOS's. I saw this, I don't know when it actually came out. I saw someone tweet about it. They tweeted it up. It came out right at the end of 2012. So it's been out about a month. Really interesting app called Social Tape. Social Tape. All one word, Social Tape. I actually spelled it wrong here. I don't know why I spelled it wrong, but I spelled it wrong. So what Social Tape does is.... You log in via your Facebook credentials. So what is credentials? Yes, I'm getting there. It's an iOS app. iOS app. You log in through your Facebook credentials and all it does is pull in all the videos from your newsfeed into one place. So it filters the whole, it filters the entire feed down to just videos.

Justin Edelstein: So if You know how like you look through your feed and sometimes people put cool videos or like, you know You follow your favorite sports team and they put the highlights in there Yeah night or someone puts a funny like viral video stupid thing on there And you just want to look at the videos. This is a way to like literally just take like 15 minutes worth of content from people that you Follow or friends with and just have it there for you at any given moment Okay, and you can skip through them skip ahead. It puts a little channel together for you It's free. I was like, I'll try it I tried it downloaded it and I've used it a few times. It's.s kind of interesting you go on a Like who I caught up with the viral videos You could skip them.

Justin Edelstein: I like them really for the sports teams because they put the highlights up there. I just like,

Jason Atwood: All right, I just caught the highlights from the Nick game class. Can you go to a just a user, so like the Nick's Facebook page and just watch all the videos from them? Not sure.

Justin Edelstein: Gonna be honest. Don't know. But that's my pick social tape. It's free. It's from a company called dragon tape and You can find it in the iTunes App Store

26:56 Jason Atwood: Sounds awesome My pick I have no idea where I got it from But sounds British it is not It's not even what you think I'm actually put the link in here so now so I can click on it and find out what it is I'll show you what it is because I have one. So I'm one of those people if I see something on the internet that I like I buy it because I'm like oh I gotta try it. So it's called the Tawtycloth. What is it? I told you it sounds British. Yes well I did it with British accent just because you said it sounded British. So it is a basically a microfiber cloth like you would find to, you know, for your eye, like you get for your eyeglasses, like your glasses or sunglasses.

Jason Atwood: Looks like a screen cleaner. And it's a screen cleaner and it's great for, I'm gonna hand you a Tautycloth and my thing and you can see it actually does a very good job. It's a great little micro thing. You just handed me your iPad Mini. It's pretty dirty, filthy, so there you go. So clean it up. So what I like, why use this versus anything else?

Justin Edelstein: Well, A. Why use this versus the cover that this came with that's supposed to clean the thing but it doesn't? Well, because now flip it around and do it on this. Oh, I'm going to use this right now. I know you are.

Jason Atwood: And you got some filth on it. And your TV. Ooh, my TV. And they come in different sizes. So these are, I bought a bunch of them. Two I use only one side. Yeah, just one side the other side like decorative Yes, the other side what- has has a design So I bought one at home a big one to put in the living room that has a big American flag on it So anyway, it's just a little micro quad that's called the Tauty Cloth. I saw it on something, I thought it was funny. They are literally like seven bucks or five bucks or whatever. If you buy two, you get like one f- free but there's some fun you buy to you I bought three actually yeah I bought two and I put that one three.

Jason Atwood: You didn't give me the free one? No, I put one in my bag to keep forever. What's up with that? But there's some neat designs they look cool they do a good job I've actually cleaned my screen a couple times. I just cleaned my screen it's beautiful. Yeah it's a neat little thing so Tottie Koss a couple bucks it's on Tottie gear.com T-O-D-D-Y Go check it out or send the show notes that are on the website. So go check those out. Neat little fun thing. I just love this. I have some great picks. I have a great, great pick for next week. It's actually sitting at home in a box waiting for me to open. I didn't even want to bring it up this morning because I want to go home and open it up and play with it all weekend.

Jason Atwood: And I think you know what it is, because I talked to you a little bit about it. And I'm so excited. So next week's pick is gonna be massive. I know about this. And it's gonna have, How do I know about it? There's multiple parts to this pick too. Like it's gonna be a pick that also comes with something else. So it's gonna be a multiple part pick next week. It might even need to be turned into a blog post. That's it for this week. Remember to go to blog.arkusinc.com to check out all the podcasts and blog posts we've talked about. Remember to go to Facebook. We're at Facebook at just Arkus Inc. And we're on Twitter at Arkus Inc. Just Edelstein over here is on Twitter, Jason M Atwood, I'm on Twitter.

30:08 Jason Atwood: We're in the Dreamforce portal, LinkedIn, we're everywhere. We're even on Google Plus, you can find us there if you wanna hook up and see what we post. Those are all the great places. Remember to subscribe in iTunes. Leave a review there, we love that. We, favorite podcasting app. whether that's from one of the millions of apps out there. I think more and more people are using these podcasting apps and not subscribing through iTunes.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, I tried last week to use podcasts instead of Instacast. I can't do it. What was the whole- I just don't even get it. Like it's not even close to as intuitive. I'm like, this doesn't- I,- can- and I and Re H., you