When Clouds Collide - Episode #2 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.

Cleaned 2026-10-14: misheard names and product terms corrected; wording otherwise unchanged.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is episode number two of the CloudFocus Weekly, titled When Clouds Collide, brought to you by Arkus, cloud computing experts. I'm your host, Jason Atwood. And joining me as my co-host is Justin Edelstein. Justin, how are you doing today? Doing great. Doing great. Thank you for asking. You're very welcome. Let me just throw a little agenda up there and say, we're gonna talk about a couple things. We're gonna talk about the article came out about the Nets, NetSuite came out with an article talking about them, sort overtaking in the marketplace. We're going to talk about Rackspace's big announcement, the OpenStack. And then we'll talk about Facebook, which just came out. Facebook has a big announcement as well about selecting Salesforce.com as their sales platform. So it's interesting news and maybe a little twist into something else. And then as, of course, at the end, we'll do our CloudFocus app pick of the week, which is now... Big feature. now which is officially named CloudFocus app pick of the week. I feel like we need a drumroll for that. I'll hit that up in post. Thank you. Okay so why don't you get us started and tell us a little about the NetSuite article and let's discuss it. Give a little summary and let's discuss.

Justin Edelstein: It was published by Reuters that that small news source company in London. I have heard of them. Yeah, the headline kind of says it all. It says NetSuite could overtake SAP in a decade. Which is a pretty strong statement when you think about it because SAP is one of the big ERP type solutions in the enterprise and to think about a cloud solution overtaking them in a decade is pretty interesting. Could the enterprise run in the cloud and NetSuite is product that promises that full ERP type of suite where you can do your account management or your CRM. I believe they have a product for CRM. They have product for financing, they have a product for project management, really full featured suite on the NetSuite of products that live in the Essentially, their CEO, Zach Nelson, flat out said to Reuters, I think in 10 years we'll be bigger than SAP. And they do sort of fight in the same space. And it's interesting because NetSuite is majority owned by Larry Ellison, who's the CEO of Oracle, who actually when speaking on behalf of Oracle likes to frown on the cloud and isn't too much of a fan of the cloud.

Jason Atwood: It's interesting because he's invested in Salesforce too. Right, he's an investor in all these

03:14 Justin Edelstein: popular and really good effective profitable cloud solutions like Salesforce for example and NetSuite. So it's actually interesting because on one hand he pooh-poohs it and then on the other hand he invests in it, just not for his own company.

Jason Atwood: I think that brings up an interesting point which is that why these companies like these big companies, and I'll throw in some other link bait as it were, and throw in Microsoft and IBM who have clearly been putting out their cloud strategy recently and are trying to get in there. Why? I guess it's good news, right? So if I were NetSuite, I want good news, I want attention. So if I come up and actually this comes right out of, I mean, boy, we're all gonna circle back here, but it comes back right out of the playbook as it were. You know, pick when you're starting a business, when you're a startup, you know, pick someone to rail against. Because if you pick someone to go up against, then it gives people someone to rally behind you, right? Say, oh yeah, let's get them. Apple does it with Microsoft, Salesforce does it with Oracle in some ways, and they actually do it with Microsoft too. But pick your enemy.

Justin Edelstein: A lot of people do it with Microsoft.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, well because they're the biggest people. So pick your enemy and then you can be the David and they're the Goliath. I think for NetSuite it's interesting for them to say yeah, well they've picked their enemy. SAP is their guy, they're going after them. But What's to stop these companies, these very large companies with unbelievable amounts of resources on just saying, hey listen, if we want to be in the cloud game, we'll just take 30 million dollars or 30 billion dollars and we'll invest it and we'll be in the cloud. They can and in some ways they're doing it. I think the more, the crux is that these companies are, they're large ships and there's an old saying about you can't maneuver a large ship quickly. It takes a long time to turn a large ship around. I think that's the case with these big players, the IBMs, Microsofts, and the SAPs and Oracles is that their infrastructure, their hierarchy, their personnel are all built to do one thing and to move them from doing that into this other environment and change the way they they think and change their business model, I don't think they necessarily have, they're not well equipped to do it. That's not saying they can't do it, cause I think they will. But just like you could say, Microsoft tried to get into search, they have all the money in the world, but how come they haven't been able to sort of take it away? They've tried and they've tried many, many times. In fact, Bing is their latest.

Justin Edelstein: I think Bing has been the most successful to date, not to get really too far off topic.

06:17 Jason Atwood: But they also just bought some money, right? Bing existed and they bought Bing and they rebranded it and then they pushed it out as Microsoft Bing and in fact have kept Microsoft away from the brand. It's just Bing. They don't say Microsoft Bing, they just say Bing. So I think it's the most successful. They also pumped hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to get it up there. So.

Justin Edelstein: Just to come back to the article for a second and talk about this 10 year roadmap for NetSuite to catch up to SAP. Just to throw the numbers out there, Last year, NetSuite did $166 million in sales, compared to SAP's $13.4 billion, with a B, in sales. So that's just 10 years. You want to make up about $12 billion, $12 and 1.5 billion. It's going to be interesting to see if they can do that.

Jason Atwood: And that's the state that SAP stops, right?

Justin Edelstein: Well, that's the thing. NetSuite's sales over the last year have actually grown 9% while SAPs have fallen by the same 9%. And Gartner has predicted and expected the cloud services market to grow by double figure percentage, 15% to 20% over the course of this coming year. So it'll be interesting to see if NetSuite can ride that tidal wave. And it's a lofty goal for 10 years, but I think the climate is right unless SAP goes ahead and either gobbles them up or creates their own cloud solution that's not three years behind.

Jason Atwood: And I think that's actually a really good segue. Thank you for setting it up like that.

Justin Edelstein: You're welcome. I tried.

Jason Atwood: To talk about the next article, the next news topic that's happened in the week of cloud, This Week in Cloud, that's not the name of this podcast, which I think is probably out of the three things we're going to talk about is probably the biggest splash. You know, NetSuite releasing, we're going to be bigger than S&P in 10 years. Yeah, okay. You know, Facebook selecting Salesforce, we can talk about how the clouds collide, which is the episode title. But I think Rackspace, which is a dedicated hosting facility, really built on a platform of having servers. And I will admit, I've been a Rackspace customer for about 10 years. So whenever I... Does it feel good to have a mid-date? Yes, it does. It's getting off my chest. Because what's interesting is when I call up and they say, what's your customer number? I tell them my customer number is a very low digit. They're like, really? I said, yes. They're like, I didn't know we had customers that low in the low number.

Jason Atwood: They have grown from what was basically a Texas, they're based in Texas, a hosting company where they rack them and stack them. Their model was a little bit slightly different from other players in that they didn't always try to go on price, they tried to beat people by support. So their prices were always a little bit higher than just buying a dedicated server. And just for all of the users that don't know dedicated servers, It's what cloud was 10 years ago in some ways, but not, it doesn't have any virtualization, but basically to say, instead of having your server in your server room, you just hire someone, you hire one in someone else's server but it's their job to take care of the hardware and the software that sort of, that they say they'll take care of. So the operating system, the database, whatever's on there, and then they support it. So hard drive fails, they check it. If the ethernet fails, they pick it up. Then you have full access to it, so it's your machine,

10:04 Jason Atwood: but you're responsible for anything you do to it from a software level.

Justin Edelstein: So what exactly has Rackspace done recently to sort of innovate and make that more cloud?

Jason Atwood: Well, that's what I'm trying to bring back. So they've been a huge player, and grown and grown and grown in the last, I would say, since as long as I've known them. Two years ago, they started to get into cloud. They bought a company called, I think, Mosso, And they bought recently, I think a year and a half ago, they bought a company named Slice Host, which I was actually a customer as well, which does virtualization. And they bought one other, they bought one other cloud server provider. But basically they started getting into, because they have all these servers, they have the ability to do virtualization. So they bought a company that's doing certified. So they started to get into the cloud, right? And they started rebranding themselves as, okay, you want dedicated hardware, we can do that for you, which isn't cloud at all, that's just hosting. And then, oh, we have now cloud services and they're gonna compete with the likes of, oh, they bought Jungle Disk, right? So a Jungle Disk is a product we actually use, which does sort of cloud backup and cloud local area networks. Okay, so they've been building this service the last couple of years and kind of putting them together and slowly building them so they kind of connect because they were all these different companies. What they just released two days ago, which I think is a game changer and I think we'll look back in two years and say, wow, or maybe five or 10 when NetSuite's as big as SAP, look back and we'll say, they released something called OpenStack, which they basically opened sourced their cloud computing software. So the stack that allows them to build cloud software for their cloud files, for Jungle Disk, and they've released some of it at this point, and for their Slices for their virtualization, they've released the software that they had, that they had built out to be proprietary. It's now open source. That's a changer. It's a changer like, you know, Apple getting involved in WebKit and making WebKit one of the biggest HTML rendering, you know, it's used by everybody now, including Google Chrome. It's big because now it makes it something that, you know, it's not proprietary to any one company.

Jason Atwood: And there are actually licensing's under the Apache 2 licensing. As you probably know, Apache is a great web server, It's open source and it's used by basically everybody because it's free, it's very, very fast, it's one of the most well supported web servers out there, it's got tons of projects behind it but it's open source so it's freely available. They released it under the Apache 2 license which is very open. There's lots of different open source licensing. I could do a whole podcast on that. I'm not going to for your sake, not mine. Please don't. Thank you. But basically it's saying we are letting you have an open source platform to build cloud services. So any company can use their software to now build cloud services. The virtualization, the multi-tenancy, you supply the hardware, you can build cloud services. Whether you want to make that a private cloud and install it in your own data center, which again, that term doesn't sit right with me, or whether you want to make it a public cloud and use it for another service. I think that's a game changer because it's basically taking

13:23 Jason Atwood: a lot of the stuff that Microsoft, Salesforce, Google have sort of kept as their own. Amazon, which is I think their major competitor, and said, listen, anybody can be the next Amazon. Here you go, here's how you do it. Here's the software to do it. I think that's huge. I think it's going to be, it's called OpenStack and this will be the thing that rattles around the internet for a while.

Justin Edelstein: So anyone can build their own cloud service on Rackspace's cloud?

Jason Atwood: Or their own.

Justin Edelstein: Or their own cloud which is hosted within the Rackspace farm? No, no, no.

Jason Atwood: Or go and build their own server farm and go build their own cloud. So because Amazon doesn't host their stuff in Rackspace, Rackspace has their own. So yes, it allows them to do both within Amazon, I mean within Rackspace, which is probably the genius of Rackspace, because they're saying, hey, you want to build your own cloud, use our servers. Great. But you can also, since it's open source, you can also use it and go build your own. And then people will get back to it. You'll have a lot more involvement from the outside community. It becomes a really, again, things that go open source have a life of their own, good and bad. I mean, we use open source software all the time. Firefox is open source. Plone, which we use for content management, is open source. a lot of these very popular things are open source and they have a life of their own. They're not controlled by sort of a corporation, they're controlled by either a foundation or the programmers involved. And so I think it just, it's a game changer in terms of the cloud space for where it will go, not tomorrow, not the next day, but maybe two to three years.

Jason Atwood: And I think it allows smaller companies to jump into a game that was very hard to jump into to develop that kind of software. So I think that kind of leads us from very small companies jumping into open source to the last article before we get to our cloud, CloudFocus app pick of the week. Which is actually just news that came out. You know, we were recording this on a Wednesday. It came out like literally hours ago, which is that Facebook, a small player in the cloud services or the cloud, social cloud as you could call it.

Justin Edelstein: Over 500 million users now.

Jason Atwood: Yep, who has some other news going on, which we could touch on, selected Salesforce.com for their sales management or CRM. Let's just call it what it is. You know, it was a press release, so it was supposed to make a splash and make everybody go, wow, we don't really know the size of the deal. You know, I don't know how big Salesforce, I mean, Facebook is in terms of people, so I don't know if it's Salesforce, you know, Salesforce has done multi-hundred or 50, 60,000 people seats for Japan posts and things like that. But what it does is it really brings two of the massive players. I mean, there's nobody out there doing more in the social space than Facebook, right? You could argue that Twitter's close, but not really. Facebook's sort of number one. And then in terms of cloud services, platform as a service, software as a service, who's bigger than Salesforce at this point? And that game could always change. So those two kind of shaking hands again

16:39 Jason Atwood: uh... and saying we're gonna work together word you know you can see that this is the start of with customers but also the start of probably some other projects they've done some things before in the past uh... so i think this is it's a lot to come uh... that will probably see sometime in the middle of or beginning of december

Justin Edelstein: i wonder how if they're already using it or not because i was reading the the uh... press release from the p r uh... newswire and It looks as if there's a statement like, Salesforce has already deployed the system across sales operations teams, along with developer relations, to automate workflows and approval processes that integrate with half a dozen existing systems. The way that they wrote that makes it seem like they've already chosen it, oh, and by the way, they rolled it out already. Which I'm not sure if that's the case or not. Cause the press release says that there are today, announcing that Salesforce has selected, or that Facebook has selected Salesforce CRM. So a little confusing, but I'm sure that they'll adopt Chatter almost immediately within Facebook if they don't already have their own little private Facebook within Facebook.

Jason Atwood: Who knows? And that's where this discussion, I think, becomes interesting because Salesforce, up to this point, has really stayed away from social networking. It has, yes, there's actually a Salesforce for Twitter, AppXG and App2 came out this week, and they do have Facebook integration to some degree. They also have... Which I don't think has been very successful. I have not seen... It's not packaged enough, because it's not packaged. It's like a roll your own. They actually roll your own.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I haven't seen very good, like, the classic demos like the Starbucks demo or the Avon mark.book demo. I just haven't seen very good real Salesforce apps inside of Facebook. Right.

Jason Atwood: And that's what's sort of interesting is that, you know, and Salesforce has done huge deals with Google before. Google actually uses Salesforce for their sales stuff. They also, they allow for, you can actually, there's an API to send things to Google's app engine through Salesforce as well as Amazon. So in some ways, Salesforce likes to play a little bit of Switzerland in this and say, hey, listen, we work with Twitter. We got a Twitter thing. We work with Facebook. We got a Facebook thing. But with Chatter, which I'll do the recap for those who didn't listen to podcast episode number one, Chatter is Salesforce's new internal social network but for internal to Salesforce. But clearly, for all of us who started using it, We thought, wow, wouldn't this be cool if somehow I could also connect it to my outside and maybe do some cross pollination for some people. I might want to cross pollinate between my Chatter and my Twitter and my Facebook status, maybe not.

19:47 Jason Atwood: So I think this is interesting because those two, they do have two very different markets, but they also are kind of playing in the same game, right? That sort of social networking. One's playing on the very social side, moms, dads, kids, friends, whatever. And the other one's playing on corporate networks, corporations, but those things, you know, they're all colliding now. All these clouds are colliding. The social networking cloud is colliding, Twitter's colliding with Salesforce because people run their businesses from Twitter, right? They announce their thing. They do press release. They do leads from Twitter. Facebook is the same thing. Like people have Facebook pages and fan pages and they announced their menus on Facebook now. So the worlds between business and social and social networking, I think are all kind of colliding at this point. It's interesting to watch these two companies who have a vested interest in both kind of make a nice statement to PR.

Jason Atwood: So that's the three stories to get us going. And now for everybody's favorite segment, Our second week for our CloudFocus app pick of the week. We'll be right back. No, we're not gonna be right back. We're just gonna, we're just going to talk about it. So I'm gonna ask you to go first, Mr. Edelstein. Tell me, what's your-

Justin Edelstein: I went first last week, I think, but I'll go first again,

Jason Atwood: because, you know, why not? I just spoke, and so I'm gonna take a break. So go ahead, tell me your Cloud App, CloudFocus app pick of the week.

Justin Edelstein: So my CloudFocus app pick of the week this week is all about backup. A lot of people when they jump into the cloud they have a little bit of a cloud conniption.

Jason Atwood: A cloud conniption.

Justin Edelstein: A cloud conniption like my data is not going to be in my data center and what happens if something happens and how do I get it back and this and that. So there is a product, it's called Backupify, the URL www.Backupify.com

Jason Atwood: It'll be in the show notes.

Justin Edelstein: What's that? It will be in the show notes, thank you. And what Backupify does is it actually will backup your data that you're using on cloud services onto another cloud. So, if you are a Google Apps user, or a big Twitter user, or a Facebook user, or a WordPress user, or have a lot of photos up in Picasa, Backupify can actually take that data that's in a cloud and back it up onto their cloud. So you can actually recover Google Docs that, not saying that Google Docs, whatever, you'd ever lose them but you know maybe someone deletes one accidentally or or you know user error something happens and the doc is gone. Backupify can actually allow you to recover that document. You know if somehow your

23:01 Justin Edelstein: WordPress blog gets corrupted it can be backed up by Backupify very easily. They have a couple different pricing plans. They have one for social media and personal accounts. They have a basic free account so you can go there right now and set it up for free with two gigs of storage, one account per service, so it'll back up one Twitter account, one Facebook account, one Picasa account, etc. And it's always free, so they say. You can get the Plus which is which is 10 gigs of storage, 5 accounts per service, monthly zip archives, so they will archive your stuff monthly and zip it up, and also give you access to some beta services. Beta services like new services that are coming out every day, I don't want to call Flickr a new service, but services in beta might be something like a blogger or your Google contacts, your Google Calendar, etc. Things that aren't in beta right now are Google Docs, Zoho, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, and Photobucket. So you can do all those things. They also have business pricing. You know, up to 250 gigabytes of storage and 50 Google Apps accounts can be backed up on Backupify. I think it's

Jason Atwood: actually quite an interesting product. It is. It's interesting that it backs up its stuff to Amazon. So you're right, they are backing up one cloud to another cloud. And in some ways, it's for the business, right? Because most of these business services that we use, cloud services like Gmail, Google Docs, Salesforce, if you're going to use Zoho, I'd say the business ones, not the ones that are the social networking ones. You pay for services. One of the things you pay for in your monthly fee, right, that is you're paying for backup, right? You're paying for them to make sure that your data is always secure. And that's part of the reason you pay. I mean, it's, it's not broken out as a line item. But certainly in Salesforce, you know, they they allow you to actually pull the data, you know, on different level accounts, pull the data down, or schedule the data to be pulled down, and you can pull it down. If you want to have like a hard copy on your or soft, I guess a soft copy on your own drive.

Jason Atwood: I think what's interesting about this is you are just kind of backing up from one cloud service to the other, okay, and it also just doesn't seem to be really, it seems to be more based on social networking sites than, you know, business. So I don't see the other big players in the sort of CRM space or, you know, I don't see any of that here. I see it's the Twitters and the Flickrs because obviously it's based on the APIs, right? So they've, all these services have created an API that you can then go in and pull data from. Without that API, these guys wouldn't be able to do it. I think they'd be more interested, they added more sort of enterprise class software as a service. So that's-

26:14 Justin Edelstein: Yeah, right now the one enterprise class one is Google.

Jason Atwood: They have Google Apps. You could throw in Zoho. You can maybe throw in Basecamp. I think those are two that I would throw into the enterprise class. You could use Basecamp in an enterprise. But again, they're saying Basecamp, not saying all of 37signals products. They have multiple products. That's only one of them. So interesting, but good pick. That's your pick, your CloudFocus app. CloudFocus app pick of the week.

Justin Edelstein: You can't laugh at it, you created it.

Jason Atwood: Yes, I can both laugh at it and create it. That's the power of me. So I'm going to pick one that, because I need to get it out, it's kind of like- Yeah, what's yours? Get it out. You know, I would probably pick it every week because it is something that I literally live by. I'll give all credit to Mr. Merlin Mann who I probably first heard about this from a long, long time ago. Merlin Mann is a productivity blogger, I guess. Is that a good... I don't know.

Justin Edelstein: Does he blog anymore? He does. He does. He blogs once in a while. He's a blogger, podcaster, web personality. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: That seems to be a new title on LinkedIn. Oh, I didn't see LinkedIn. That's one of the things you can back up. Anywho, so I'm a productivity guy. I really love productivity. As you know, I read all the books. I believe in enhancing productivity, always working at it, kind of like a constant thing. And one of the tools that I use that is actually a cloud-based tool is called Evernote. If you know Evernote, you can just shut off the podcast right now because you love it. Don't do that because I'm gonna tell you more things that you probably never knew you could do. But Evernote in Basics is a, let's start with it's a, it's notes, it's just notes, right? So it's personal notes that you can write and it's stored on a website. Where Evernote becomes more interesting is they've built out lots of applications that sync. So they have a client for Windows. And you can then write your notes.

Jason Atwood: You can categorize them, you can tag them, you can put them in folders. You can do rich text. And that's great for Windows. Oh, they also have a client, a hard client for Mac OS X. So right there in your dock, you click on it, it syncs them all down. They also have a client for the iPhone. And they also have a client for, I think, Blackberry. I think they must have one for Android. And I think Android. So the point is here that everywhere you go you can have your notes with you. You can take notes and they'll sync up and they sync across all platforms and they do it well and as we'll probably say in a million different times.

Justin Edelstein: No I'm sorry to cut you off, they also have the Palm and the Windows Mobile.

Jason Atwood: There you go. So it's all your notes belong to us, which is that you can write them anywhere, you can get to them, search is great, but it has a whole bunch of other things. You can put in other documents like PDFs, they have a free plan but then they have a pay plan. What it also does is they do OCR, which is Optical Character Recognition. So I can take a snapshot of a document, a picture, and send it up through the iPhone let's say, and they'll run it through the OCR and look for words. And then when I search my notes, they'll pick out those words out of the document, whether I hand wrote it or whether it was just a picture of something. So people use it for wine labels. You take a picture of a wine bottle and it will OCR the wine label and you can search for it that way. And it'll actually-

30:01 Justin Edelstein: I use it for whiteboarding. It has it for white.

Jason Atwood: You can take a picture in whiteboard and send it up there. A business card. I mean, the things are endless.

Justin Edelstein: to tell it where you are. You can sort of search or filter by location of where you took a note. It has, you know, when you have hundreds of notes, thousands of notes, it's easier to, sometimes those features are really make a difference in finding stuff.

Jason Atwood: So what's beautiful is there's a free version. I've been using the free version for a long time. I can't figure out, they haven't made the jump to the premium and I'm usually a guy who goes for the premium. They haven't made it for a reason. I can just go, that's the reason I'm going to go up because it has enough in the free version which is great for everybody else. You can share them, tag them, there's even someone developed a little AppExchange product where you can actually sync them, it doesn't work 100% great, we've tried it a couple of times, sync them with Salesforce. So if you're a big Salesforce user and you want to have notes, so there's a whole idea of you could then attach the note from Evernote to a contact or a lead, you can get kind of deep in there. Anyway, great product, Evernote, Evernote.com. E-V-R-N-O-T-E.com. You'll notice, once you know, you'll know them by the little, their icon is a elephant, and like an elephant head for, I guess, remembering, you know, for the elephant remembers forever.

Jason Atwood: And they are just, they're a very good company. They always update their stuff. They are, they just released, and I guess this is why it's a good pick, they just released called the Evernote Trunk, right? playing with the elephant, it's very funny. But basically it's all these apps that work with Evernote. Either feed things into Evernote or do other things like take transcribed voice notes in Evernote and so there's all sorts of things they do. It's called the Evernote Trunk. If you go to Evernote.com you'll see it there. It's kind of like their little AppExchange or their little iTunes app store. I mean it's probably 50, 60 things. I looked over it the other day. but great product. Everybody should use Evernote forever and ever and ever note. And so that actually so you use Evernote just want to make you do I do yeah use it mostly on my

Justin Edelstein: iPhone. I do have the client installed on my on my MacBook, but I use it mostly on my iPhone for notes on the go and oftentimes when I'm whiteboarding with a client or just whiteboarding doodling on my own to capture some ideas. I then will take a snapshot of it, tag it, and I know it's, you know, safe. I can then erase the whiteboard, right? So that's Evernote,

33:14 Jason Atwood: and that'll bring us to the end of the second episode. Thank you, Justin, for joining me for two of the second greatest podcasts on the planet, and we will see you next week, where there'll be more More cloud news to discuss and more CloudFocus App Picks of the week. Until then, this is Jason Atwood and Justin Edelstein saying hang out in the clouds. Bye bye.