Middleware Syncing 2 Salesforce Orgs to 1 Marketo Instance

[Courtney_Tobe2]

Hi, 

I'm getting ready to integrate two Salesforce Orgs into one instance of Marketo leveraging a third party Middleware platform. We selected Workato as our Middleware provider. I'm curious if anyone on here has leveraged Workato or a similar platform for this type of integration before. If so, I'd love to hear about any roadblocks or major issues that you experienced during the initial implementation that I might need to be aware of going into it. Any help, best practices or tips would be greatly appreciated! 

Thanks,

Courtney

[Jay_Jiang]

Just reading the title gave me the shudders. May I ask why?

I personally haven't worked with Workato but my experience with middleware and integrations is that a lot of your time will be taken up by integration maintenance.

Is it worth the added exponential complexity and maintenance of integrating two Salesforce instances with one Marketo as opposed to two 1:1 set ups? Not to mention the functionality you'd lose by not using the native connector...

[SanfordWhiteman]

My reaction is much the same, Jay. Not to mention that Workato itself is a developer's tool (it doesn't dumb things down, to its credit).

If you're starting such a project and cannot turn back, I hope you've allocated at least couple hundred hours to make it work reliably under load, have a proper test suite, and have people who are dead-solid-fluent in SFDC and Marketo working on it.

[Courtney_Tobe2]

Unfortunately, it's too late in the game to make any changes at this point. We performed in-depth evaluations with our Marketo technical consultants and it was the best option for our particular use case and business requirements (even though I know it's not the ideal set up). At this point, I'm just looking for any tips/best practices from individuals who have performed a similar implementation. Thanks.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Who is doing the implementation?  How big is the team, and how deep is their experience with the platforms on either side (and in the middle)?

If your team has never done this before then a few scattered tips on the Community aren't going to help...

[Jay_Jiang]

I'm honestly shocked Marketo technical consultants would recommend such a solution. In saying that though, I did investigate such a concept for a franchise head office with 70+ franchisees where each had their own CRM instance (not salesforce) and the franchise head office wasn't willing to purchase 70+ marketo instances. (BTW, it never went ahead)

Two main points that people are echoing here:

Have the right expertise, you need to get the solution architecture right (e.g. consider introducing a data warehouse to consolidate/standardise fields from CRMs then 1:1 the DWH and Marketo)

Be prepared for excessive amounts of maintenance - even if you get the solution right, if you don't have enough resources to maintain/service the integration, you'll fail

[Grant_Booth]

I love Workato. But nevertheless my first thought is "Are you absolutely positive you can't use two separate Marketo instances instead?" I feel like that would (shockingly) be less expensive than maintaining an enormous custom integration. It seems odd to me that the business scenario would require two separate SFDC subscriptions but couldn't function with two Marketo instances. If the business units are so separate that they need different CRMs, it seems like they wouldn't want to share a single marketing automation platform.

[Josh_Hill13]

You could push the two SFDC Orgs into separate WS/LPs depending on the use cases and security. That might have been a better idea for the scenario Jay identified.

I agree with Sanford that this needs to be load tested due to the use of the API instead of the std Sync. What's the record volume and update volume? Dedupe plan?

A second Marketo instance may not be that expensive depending on your existing deal with them and if you plan to keep your record count total for both instances within the existing range.