This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Omniture co-founder and former CEO Josh James launched a company Wednesday that he says could revolutionize the way executives manage their enterprises.
James, one of Utah's most high-profile entrepreneurs, said Domo Technologies Inc. had attracted$43 million in funding, including $33 million from Benchmark Capital. Domo is entering the business intelligence software sector that James said has about $10 billion in annual sales.
"We want to make a Fortune 500 company," he said before an evening event launching the company.
He aims to do that by addressing a big problem facing business executives. Typically, a large business has a number of systems that gather information about such things as cash flow, sales figures, customer feedback, personnel and supply chains but has no way to bring all that data together in a timely manner.
That was true with Omniture, the Utah County company later sold to Adobe Systems Inc. that provides analysis to companies about traffic to websites. But James said as a CEO, he was constantly frustrated because much of that information was difficult to access or only available in monthly reports.
"I would get a couple of dozen reports in my email every month and then I'd have a username and password for probably 20 different systems," he said.
Domo's products are delivered through banks of computers called clouds and sit on top of all the various systems a company might have and gather and analyze data that are delivered on demand to a manager through a Web browser or mobile device. That access to company information will allow companies to quickly make decisions that will help the bottom line, James said.
As an example, James cited a problem at Omniture, where the company's cash receivables were down because several Japanese customers had stopped paying their bills. That was because the company was performing computer maintenance at night in the U.S. when it was daytime in the Asia, taking down clients' ability to use Omniture's system.
"Well, that took a couple of months to piece all that together because the data was just not tied together," he said. "Where now, you get a report that says your cash balance is below the target. You click on it, you see your receivables are low. You click on it, you see three Japanese customers aren't paying. You click on your customer service report and you see a bunch of them are ticked off and you see why."
Domo, which James says is already serving about 100 clients, was launched at a Wednesday evening event at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City. Its 120 employees will be housed at operations in American Fork.
James cofounded Omniture in 1996 while a student at Brigham Young University. By the time it was sold in 2009, Omniture had about $500 million a year in revenue.
James left his post as senior vice president of Adobe in July 2010, nine months after Omniture was purchased.
After his exit, James started a company called Shacho to jump-start his vision for a new business intelligence system. He then bought Corda Technologies, another Utah company that was doing some of the same things that he hoped to do with his new company.
Shacho and Corda were combined and renamed Domo, the Japanese word for "thank you," which James said he hopes drives its focus on customer service.
Mark Gorenberg, managing director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and a Domo board member, said Domo's dashboard, an easy-to-read user interface that gathers information from various sources, is part of what sold him on the new company.
"We're convinced Domo's dashboards will be the next killer app for the mobile enterprise worker," he said.
The amount of business data available has exploded in recent years, Gorenberg said, but even company executives haven't been able to take advantage of all that information.
"I think that's another area Domo is really unlocking, where if I'm the CEO of a company I can get the information I want in real time on my iPad while I'm talking to other people," he said. "It's a very powerful tool for helping me make real-time decisions."
Twitter: @tomharveysltrib Domo board
Josh James • Founder, chairman and CEO
Matt Cohler • General partner at Benchmark Capital, who was the fifth Facebook employee and a member of LinkedIn's founding team
Mark Gorenberg • Managing director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and former board member of Omniture
John Thompson • Former chairman and CEO of Symantec and current CEO of Virtual Instruments
Fraser Bullock • Cofounder and managing director at Sorenson Capital, former Omniture board member and one of the founding partners of Bain Capital
Neal Williams • Founder of Corda, the first company acquired by Domo