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Josh James started the Web analysis firm Omniture in 1996 in Lehi, Utah, and to this day it’s one of the most widely used marketing tools for tracking and analyzing how people click through websites and how they buy things online.
Omniture grew really fast. When James took it public in 2006 it was valued at $336 million, and when he sold it to Adobe in 2009 it went for $1.8 billion. He got rich then soon bolted Adobe, and about a year later he was out raising money again for a new venture, Domo.
And that’s what makes his forthcoming appearance onstage at our Code/Enterprise Series event on April 21 in San Francisco so interesting. A lot of people are curious to see if what Domo has built is as great as James has coyly implied. Now he has to show the world that he’s got the goods.
What exactly does Domo do? James has yet to show the product to anyone other than customers and then only under the conditions of a strict non-disclosure agreement.
But here’s what we know about Domo so far: It’s a software platform that pulls in all of a company’s operational data — finances, inventory, people, manufacturing — and displays it in a live, easy-to-understand dashboard that can tell executives exactly what the state of the business is in an up-to-the minute fashion. If it doesn’t sound sexy then consider it from the point of view of a CEO: Every company in existence has to track this information, but gathering it is complicated and tedious, and usually the resulting reports are weeks old.
Betting that James can repeat what he did with Omniture, numerous venture capital firms including Greylock, Salesforce Ventures, Bezos Expeditions and institutional investors like T. Rowe Price have poured nearly a quarter-billion dollars into Domo, which like Omniture is also based in Utah. Last year TPG Growth led the most recent funding round for $125 million, valuing Domo at $825 million.
Domo’s customers include major banks, airlines and at least one bread company, none of which James has yet disclosed. A few customers he has named include eBay, Telefonica and publisher National Geographic. And hinting at a repeat of his Omniture days, James has suggested he might take Domo public either late this year or sometime in 2016.
James is one of four speakers we’ve lined up for our first Code/Enterprise event. The others are Aaron Levie, the CEO of the cloud storage and collaboration company Box; Kevin Mandia, the COO of security company FireEye; and Diane Bryant, a senior VP at Intel and head of its $15 billion data center business unit.
We’re meeting up on the evening of April 21 at the Dogpatch Wineworks in San Francisco, and we hope to see you there. Tickets are still available but they’re going fast. If you can’t make it, we’re hosting another event in New York on Sept. 29. More details about that coming soon.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
