I'm shocked to learn about Marketo's Salesforce Sync Backlog

I had hour-long calls with two highly experienced Marketo consultants/experts this last week.

Both calls were for them to learn more about Paminga.

I do lots of calls where I provide an overview/mini-demo of Paminga. But these calls were decidedly different.

Pretty much from the start, the main topic they wanted to focus on was how Paminga deals with Salesforce sync backlogs.

I was at a loss when the first person brought this up because Paminga does not have a problem with Salesforce sync backlogs.

And it's not because our customers are small. We have many customers with record counts in the millions and 10's of millions (global organizations with multi-billion dollar valuations).

So I asked a lot of questions and listened. It was explained to me that Marketo's "throughput" – the number of records that can be synced to Marketo from Salesforce – is, for practical purposes, limited to ~18,000 records per hour.

So if 600,000 records need to be synced to Marketo, you're looking at more than 33 hours for the sync to complete.

But if another large batch of records are changed before that sync is finished, your sync backlog grows and grows, sometimes taking weeks to clear.

Holy schnikes.

This is a nightmare for marketing operations. Data can be entirely out date, or missing entirely, for days or weeks.

Both of these persons peppered me on this topic for more than 30 minutes. It was their main focus. Because it's a complete sh*t show for them and has been for years.

I pinged our lead CRM engineer via Slack. He informed me that Paminga's throughput averages ~250,000 records per hour syncing to Paminga from Salesforce.

Roughly the same applies to our sync from Dynamics D365 CRM to Paminga.

And we've not even spent much time optimizing that throughput.

This is crazy inexcusable to me. I'm a fairly experienced software architect.

There is no good reason this has not been solved by Adobe, or even just Marketo back before their acquisition.