The 2019 North American Podio Partners Meetup was the first of its kind. Taking place in Santa Clara, CA, on the verge of the Cirtrix’s Converge Conference, several North American partners met for the first time, proclaiming, “Now I can put a face to the name that I’ve seen so often in the forums.”
Day One was a half day at Star Space, with partners trickling in as they arrived from their travels for a light lunch and lighthearted discussion. Partners were eager to chat about how they fit into the word “partner” to Citrix’s Podio platform, whether they be a lone developer, managing their own company on Podio, or an agency consultant and developer.
But then it was time for a deep dive into the topic of the day which ended up heavily revolving around a demo from Brick Bridge Consulting’s Alex Shull on an integration of Podio and Amazon Web Server. With how fast and affordable AWS is, the partners were interested in getting their hands dirty with it, requesting access to a sample code to play around with themselves.
The day rounded to an end with a happy hour, and more networking talk. The partners began to bond over common workarounds to Podio in order to accommodate their own or their clients needs, as well as shared hopes about changes to certain Podio attributes.
Day two of the meetup began bright and early at Citrix’s Santa Clara location, with breakfast and a barista awaiting the partners arrival. The content kicked off quickly, since the schedule was full for the day, with the first round of Partner Showcases.
Mike Demunter, of Quivvy Tools, showcased how Partners could get a 360° look of their Podio builds and Globiflows with Quivvy Tools and it’s new Chrome Extension that makes understanding solution structure and repairing broken Globiflows easily accessible. Joel Ordesky showed the Partners some of his most clever, and sometimes long, automations to create a Solution that fits a client’s needs to a tee.
After a hearty, delicious lunch, the partners got to discuss the future of Podio, it’s integration into Citrix Workspace, and what Citrix was working on with Sara Høeg Højlund-Rasmussen and Jay Tomlin of Citrix. The partners were able to have a free and open discussion, raise their questions and concerns, and get new insights from this section of the Meetup.
Then it was time to round out the day with the final set of Partner Showcases. Jacquelyn May, a former Citrix employee who now builds out Podio Solutions on her own, showed some of her Solutions for companies that rent out houses that need to hire local cleaners. Seth Helgeson, Podio’s original North American Partner from TechEGo, showcased his two Podio Extensions: Sync - a backup for Podio Solutions - and Print - a PDF template that you can create using Podio forms to automatically fill it out. Lastly, Gil from Brick Bridge Consulting unveiled SaaSsafras, their newest product that allows developers to copy Podio Solutions and deploy an exact copy (including flows) to clients with the click of a button.
When it was all said and done, they had to kick the partners out to close up because the conversations didn’t want to end. The first North American Podio Partners Meetup was a success, and we are all excited for many more to come in the future with even more partners.
