One idea that exists in the Salesforce world and I think has spurred the adoption of that platform tremendously, but that doesn't exist in Marketo yet is that of a developer sandbox. As Marketo plays a more central role as a multi-channel marketing automation platform - not everything gets routed through CRM's these days - and would play a pivotal role in helping developers better understand how to interact with a marketo instance. The "developer sandbox" would be different than a sandbox tied to a customer's contract as it would be:
- Free
- Would be limited to 1-2 users
- Intended for developers to learn how to interact with a Marketo instance - and develop a single piece of new custom integration
- Could have additonal limitations:
- Person Record limit
- Emails Sent per day
- Very limited activity history retention
Why would Marketo want to even bother with this?
- Sandboxes are meant to be an isolated environment for testing something. As a marketo customer adds teams, groups & divisions who all want to interact with Marketo, having a "developer sandbox" is one way that one developer can try out new ideas with his/her code and not be impacted by code from another developer in the same company.
- Is in keeping with the open & transparent model that Marketo is following - now more documentation is public for the world to enjoy - why not open up the actual application as well? As new integrations are coded, a new ecosystem will emerge - these will likely expand the offerings on LaunchPoint.
- There are other marketing automation platforms that offer limited "trial" versions of a product.
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