SFDC Professional Edition customers - sync change alert - please read!

HI again Erica,

Copying here some of the comments I made on the other thread, and adding a couple:

• List price for EE is 2 times list price for PE.
• Yet, Salesforce cannot just cut this as they want. People have contracts, some of them multi-year contracts, and the products delivered cannot be changed at least until the contract is ended. So if someone can be hit by this in January, it's only those whose contract will be renewed now, or customers who just want to acquire the API now.
• I am investigating on my side of the ocean and I'll keep you posted, but here in France, no one has ever got the API on PE for free. It's being charged an additional 30% on top of the PE licence.
• Also, and that's my personal experience, when SFDC stops something, it only impacts new customers, not existing one. I, for instance benefit from the old FREE self service portal that has been discontinued 3 years ago, but since we have been renewing our contract for 7 years now, we still get it.
• The fact that Marketo is a competitive product to Pardot is really not a good argument: the API can be used for any third party product. It's documentation is completely public and SFDC cannot control what one is using the API for. Furthermore, legally, in the EU, you cannot refuse to sell the API to 1 customer and agree to sell it to another. So if SFDC wants to stop the product, they will have to do it for everyone. This means that simply interrupting the API for all PE customers would not just drive mad Marketo customers, but thousands of SFDC customers using the API for any other purpose, excepted Marketing automation. Not a very good move if you want my take. This would end up upgrading everyone to the EE for the price of the PE and opening a very large door to salesforce alternatives

So all this seems quite weird, even may be is it a personal initiative of a not so ethical sales person.

-Greg

BtW, this is what Marketo own doc says for SFDC PE:

-Greg

Erica Harris ,

A clarification on the one-way/2-way thing. The Marketo integration with sf.com is bi-directional. But, we manage this bi-directional integration from the MKTO side. At a high level:

- We use the sf.com API (from Marketo to sf.com) to ask what has changed in sf.com and then update MKTO

- We use the sf.com API (also from Marketo to sf.com) to update/create sf.com records based on changes and workflow in MKTO

In both these cases, we use the API's into sf.com to manage the integration. We do not need to make any calls from sf.com into MKTO.

Please let us know if any clarification is needed.

Aj

Erica, Grégoire,

I've been getting more details and I was mistaken in the other thread. The Marketo > SFDC integration only needs one-way API calls. All of the data transferred through the standard integration goes through the API calls that are generated from Marketo. No API calls are generated by SFDC, so you do only need the one-way API calls.

-Mike

Thank you all for the clarification.  I can confirm that the "you must upgrade to the Enterprise Edition" response received from Erica's Salesforce rep is exactly what I received.  As of Jan 31st, midnight, our Marketo sync with Salesforce went down and has remained inoperable.

We had followed the instructions from Marketo and contacted Salesforce support last year about the potential for sync problems.  We added the new fields and were told that there should be no sync issues.

When the sync stopped we naturally got on the horn with both Salesforce and Marketo and, after much back and forth, were told that a SF upgrade would be necessary to resume the integration.  We're a small company with 13 SF users. My SF contract is up in July and I have no intention of paying what amounts to blackmail to upgrade.

Anyone gotten else having the same issues? Anyone found a work-around?

Thanks!