In the slightly hectic build-up to Salesforce World Tour this week, there are many meetings taking place in London with teams of ISV’s, SI’s, developers and anyone with an interest in Salesforce descending on London to find out what the latest developments are in the Salesforce world.

Not least of which is the Salesforce team themselves who have gathered from around Europe to meet clients and partners as well as their team. One of these groups is the European ISV team who met on Tuesday to look at their business plans and how they can continue to add value to their ISV clients.

Locked away in the cells, literally, the event took place in the Old Courthouse in Shoreditch, one part of the day consisted of a panel of experts from across the AppExchange Product spectrum discussing exactly what is meant by PDO and how specialists play a role as opposed to general consultants.

With a tight time schedule, it was always going to be a challenge to keep to the allotted slot, especially when the bar was calling at the end of the day, however, there were a number of key points that were raised on what is required from a specialist PDO, not simply focussing on Product Development Outsourcing. Overall, it was agreed that fundamental to any project success was the ability to build relationships and add value not just through the technical knowledge, but as importantly, the business knowledge of the PDO.

There were many other points raised and these were all summed up by one of the last questions asked which highlighted a number key attributes that a PDO needed:

• Relevance, does the #PDO have knowledge that is up to date
• Specialism, do they have expertise in that industry sector and with those apps
• Honesty, will they say no if they don’t have the right experience for an ISV or if an ISV wants to take their product into a direction that won’t work
• Scalability, does the #PDO have the resource to increase the team when needed without impacting the project
• Product Focused, does the PDO understand what is needed to get a product to market and how can they help the ISV deliver this

There were also a number of other skills discussed including

• PDOs supporting Keeping the Lights On
• Security Review
• Packaging Strategy
• Go To Market Strategy
• Industry Specialisation

The discussion was a massive success with the Salesforce team being able to understand what the difference between a Genuine PDO and a consultancy is and how a PDO can help them add value to their clients.

However, the real winner was Alexandria Ysmael, who entered the quiz at the end of the discussion and won a bottle of Krug, my only regret, I didn’t get to share it with her.