Future of SFDC Integration??

[Anonymous]

Thanks much Sanjay (and Heather & Liz) for keeping us posted here in the community. Those of us active here in the community are aso the Marketo evangelists at our repective firms--I'm sure I'm not the only one here being asked about this. Your openness and comments give us the messages we can deliver back to our management.

Please continue to keep us posted!

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the update, Sanjay. We appreciate you taking the time to personally respond.

Removing Marketo from the AppExchange still seems like a petty move, but your comments (very diplomatically) frame the decision from a reality-of-business standpoint. I think it seems so unnatural because Salesforce and Marketo always gave the outward appearance of a very symbiotic and cordial relationship. I suppose things change rapidly when you become competitors, huh?

I was an ExactTarget customer 5 years ago for about 2 months before bouncing them and going with Genius.com. ET is pretty much a tool for newsletter management. They're big on customer base, shallow on capabilities and were not a very good partner to work with in my experience. 

Pardot was, along with Marketo, in our final 2 last year when we were looking to upgrade from Genius. It's a very capable tool at a friendly price, but it's no Marketo. We would have reached their limitations pretty quickly. They're going to have to beef up their capabilities and workflow processes significantly to compete at an Enterprise-level. The state of integration of Radian 6 and Buddy Media, in addition to how long it’s taken to truly integrate Jigsaw/Data.com, makes me think that this SFDC/ET/Pardot marriage will take a while to gel.

Anyway, it’s nice to hear that Marketo remains in a strong position and that it appears Salesforce remains committed to being an open platform. If they start acting up, though, Marketing Nation's got your back! And if there's one thing we know how to do, it's get our message across effectively.

[Anonymous]

Hello fellow members of the Marketing Nation!  In the vein of keeping you updated, I wanted to drop a quick note here -- consistent with our prior message about customer success.  I'm happy to tell you that Marketo's listing is visible again on the @Salesforce AppExchange http://bit.ly/10u8e6M and tomorrow we are back jointly partnering at Cloudforce Toronto as a sponsor.  And, we remain a Titanium sponsor at Dreamforce.  We all are focused on making customers and the Marketing Nation successful.  

[Anonymous]

I agree with Tom on Pardot - having used it before, it does not compare to Marketo (yet).  Additionally, there is always a love/hate relationship in spaces like this - Salesforce.com wants to be able to "do it all" for its mid-tier clients but functionality-wise for large scale clients, there are typically vendors who have served those purposes (like Marketo, Eloqua) that cannot be matched in an all-in-one solution.

Kudos to Marketo for jumping in and publicly discussing this.