EBS to RBS migration with SQL Enterprise

Question

All of our customers are currently using EBS for Sharepoint 2007 / 2010 with a custom provider that we provide as part of our solution.  
We built an RBS provider for our Sharepoint 2013 version of our product but just found out that it cannot be used on SQL Server Standard.  
So my question for Microsoft is how can you deprecate EBS for Sharepoint 2013 and force all of our customers using SQL server standard to pay to upgrade their database to SQL Enterprise (not a small fee) just so they can continue to externalize their Sharepoint
content on a UNC path or SAN?  This is essentially telling customers that they must pay, in some cases, $18,000 to upgrade to Sharepoint 2013.  I understand that you may want to charge non Sharepoint SQL customers for moving SQL BLOBs to a network
path / drive.  But it is not right to all of a sudden charge customers for doing what they are already doing with Sharepoint 2010 just because they want to move to Sharepoint 2013.  I am sure we will have customers that will consider not using our
product or Sharepoint if this policy persists and I don't think either of us wants that.  
What options can you provide now and is there anything we can do to raise this up the chain of command at MS?
Thanks,
Bill

Answer 1

Our customers typically have millions of documents in Sharepoint.  The reason we have always externalized is because we don't want the database size to be Terabytes.  Not even sure what the maximum supported size is but don't really want to deal
with restoring DBs that size if ever needed.  
One of the ways that legacy ECM solutions have always sold against MS Sharepoint is by telling customers that they need have to store documents in the database.  Ours and other partners EBS / RBS solutions attempt to address this concern for true enterprise
wide content management applications.  We are not storing collaborative marketing material in Sharepoint.  We are storing transactional documents like vendor invoices, purchase orders, student records, etc.  Do you think Shredded storage alleviates
the concern of a storing millions of blobs in SQL or that storing that many blobs is not really a problem?
Thanks,
Bill