If you’re a salesforce user, or even just a salesforce.com user, you may have noticed that there’s a cloud of data around salesforce.com. Salesforce.com (the company) is an enterprise sales platform that includes many tools that help companies automate and streamline their sales processes. Salesforce.com is a leading cloud-based software platform that has a data processing team in over 100 countries.
The cloud is big, I would think. If you have any doubts as to its potential, theres a few points you should be aware of. A cloud is a shared infrastructure that spans a specific geographic area. Cloud services are much more flexible than hardware because they have the ability to easily scale to handle increased traffic. Cloud services are also much more efficient and responsive.
So how do you know if a cloud service meets your needs? For your first consideration, how much data is your company storing? If this is a small company, its likely that the data you need won’t be stored at all. If your company is much larger, most likely you could store it on an in-house database server or somewhere online.
If you’re a small business, you can only store so much data. If you’re a large business, you could store all of your data on the cloud if you wanted to, but the amount of overhead involved would negate the value. You’d be spending a lot of money to maintain your current servers if you put all of your data on the cloud.
We’ve seen a lot of cloud solutions over the past few years. Some are great, but none can make a company like Salesforce, which is currently the biggest cloud database service company in the world, look as smooth as Salesforce.com.
Salesforce has its own web site (www.salesforce.com) and has been in the cloud for quite a while. They don’t have the huge amount of data storage and processing available with the cloud and the overhead is just too high for Cloud Computing, so they’ve opted for the more scalable solution, one they call “Cloud Apps”. Cloud Apps allow users to access their data from anywhere, on any device.
Companies like Salesforce make money from their data, and are thus in a position to sell you their data. But by selling their data they have the advantage of keeping all that money for themselves. By using the cloud they can offer you their data without actually selling it. Salesforce offers a lot of features on the cloud, including built-in data sync and data export. Users need only point their phone to the cloud and they can quickly access the data they want.
Salesforce is the cloud’s biggest competitor. But the biggest competitor is also the least accurate. Salesforce is a very easy data source to get “high quality” data about. But the data they get is not always accurate. For example, they offer a “data export” feature that allows you to download an entire spreadsheet of information that you’ve already “filled in,” but you can only export that data once.
There are a few features of Salesforce that make it easier for users to get accurate data. For example, you can export entire objects and then import them into your salesforce org. This allows you to quickly get accurate data about any object that youve added to your org.
And yes, when you export a data warehouse, you get an error. I’m not sure if it was due to a technical limitation or a bug, but I can tell you that Salesforce’s data export feature is not always accurate. And you can actually import a database into your Salesforce org without doing something crazy. But that’s not always the case.