Navigating Our Way to Becoming PDO Experts

As we kick off 2021, Extentia is thrilled to announce that we have officially been certified as PDO Expert Navigators, one of only a handful in the world.

The extensive experience we’ve gained over the years deploying innovative, state-of-the-art, Lightning-ready AppExchange solutions means we’re now better prepared to help our partners realize and surpass their business goals.

Having earned the much-coveted badge of honour as PDO Experts, we look forward to continuing to leverage our experience and offer excellence to ISVs.

Extentia’s foray into the AppExchange ecosystem has been an enthralling adventure, full of fundamental learnings and enriching opportunities. Over the last few years, as PDOs, we’ve carried out a variety of implementations for ISVs across domains.

While we’re never ones to rest on our laurels, we wanted to take a quick walk down memory lane – reminiscing on the phenomenal journey so far and underlining some of our more notable achievements along with valuable lessons we’ve learned along the way.

Our adventure began in early 2015, when Extentia’s team met with the core AppExchange team at Dreamforce and discussed a tentative roadmap for Extentia to follow to become PDOs. We were tasked with completing enough projects and certifications to prove our expertise and to present the same to the AppExchange leadership team at the next Salesforce Partner Meet.

In mid-2016, at the Salesforce Family Meet, we presented our capabilities and demonstrated our areas of expertise along with our upskilling initiatives and the overall certifications we’d accrued. We placed particular emphasis on the areas that we’d excelled in to demonstrate to the Salesforce Ohana why Extentia would make a fantastic addition to the PDO Partner program. In doing so, we showcased several AppExchange apps, including our innovative ‘Map Plotter’ and a pathbreaking AppExchange application in the Healthcare domain that we’d delivered with our partner. We also demonstrated specialized knowledge in areas such as Heroku and third-party integrations.

Later that same year, after much anticipation, we were officially granted the title of a Salesforce PDO and celebrated the first step towards becoming a world-class PDO. Separately, we also enrolled in the Consulting Partner Program, to extend our reach and customer base, and grow our Salesforce Practice.

Our progression as a PDO was steady at first. We started with a handful of early projects that allowed us to cut our teeth with the intricacies of ISV implementations. Over the years, we’ve gone from strength to strength, increasing our team size, earning more certifications and taking on more ambitious projects as we gained both expertise as well as experience in releasing apps to the AppExchange.

In 2018-19 we decided to invest in growing the PDO side of our practice; upskilling our teams, hiring some of the best up-and-coming Salesforce talent and partnering with more ISVs to help bring their solutions to the AppExchange.

We took on projects that we believed would enable our teams to learn the most and move further up the PDO hierarchy. In November, our drive, tenacity, and ambition paid off as we were awarded the title of ‘Specialist Navigator’ just ahead of Dreamforce 2019.

From there on, we’ve pushed countless implementations across a variety of domains thorough security review and have had them successfully listed on the AppExchange. Doing so has allowed us to cement our place as ‘PDO Expert Navigator’ and officially certify the level of excellence that we bring to the Salesforce ecosystem.

As PDO Expert Navigators, we work with ISVs across the globe to define, wireframe, develop, package, and list products on the Salesforce AppExchange. Our proven expertise with Salesforce’s security review processes and submissions across the years, combined with upskilled knowledge in newer AppExchange technologies like 2G Packaging helps us to bring ISV solutions to the AppExchange and into the hands of Salesforce users quickly and efficiently.

Our first few PDO projects started out in Australia and North America with projects like AHM Centris Direct, Dubber, SmartFox Technologies’ SmartFox Prime and Silver Fox Solution’s Express Console.

In the last couple of years, we’ve extended our partner network to other parts of the globe, notably Europe, where we’ve had the opportunity to work with newer ISVs such as LinkedCar in Belgium, Zkipster in Switzerland and Warwick Analytics in the United Kingdom to name just a few to help build and release their solutions on the Salesforce AppExchange.

We’ve gone from fresh-faced debutants on the PDO stage to the highest echelon of the ISV ecosystem. We’ve undertaken and delivered AppExchange implementations across domains, technologies, and Salesforce Clouds that harness every aspect of our multifaceted, cross-functional experience with various Salesforce technologies.

As we look ahead to 2021, we hope to consolidate our position as one of a select few PDO Expert Navigators across the globe; refining our processes and adding more and more specializations to our ever-growing skillset. And we remain committed to bringing the latest advancements and technological innovations into the hands of our partners. In doing so we hope to collaboratively create solutions that allow individuals, organizations, and communities to thrive despite the uncertainty of the times we live in.

Extentia’s Salesforce Team is proud to be a Salesforce PDO Expert Navigator, and we look forward to continuing on this journey with our customers, partners and friends from across the Salesforce Ohana. Together we can and we will , ‘Do More, Be More’.

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Extentia, a Salesforce Consulting Partner, has over a decade of experience across various clouds including Sales, Service, Marketing and Community Cloud with a strong focus on Health Cloud and Financial Services Cloud implementations. Extentia strives to consistently deliver value to customers with experience-centric transformation, design-led solutioning, and Customer 360 implementations, with a particularly impressive track-record in building Salesforce solutions with Lightning Web Components (LWC), Einstein Analytics, Heroku, and third-party integrations. As Salesforce certified PDO Experts, Extentia has proven expertise in Salesforce’s security review processes, and works with ISVs across the globe to define, wireframe, develop, package and list products on the Salesforce AppExchange.

To know more about Extentia’s Salesforce Practice write to us at salesforce.consulting@extentia.com

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