Summary Bullets:
- Domo remains as flamboyant as ever both in how it goes to market and in how it approaches BI as a business operating system.
- Yet, a surprising new go-to-market message hints at a newfound maturity that underscores the company’s desire to play a crucial, central role in the success of its customers.
To say that the corporate culture at Domo is unique is to do a serious disservice to all Domo employees, or ‘Domosapiens,’ as they like to call themselves. Domo’s corporate culture is not your typical corporate attempt to feign a sense of style. Domo is downright wacky behind the leadership of its enigmatic founder and CEO, Josh James. Case in point, at this year’s Domopalooza conference in Salt Lake City, Mr. James made a rather interesting entrance during the keynote. Not content to follow the opening entertainment act, put on by the KinJaz dance group, the Domo CEO actually danced a full routine with the group.
Clearly, the company and its CEO show no signs of slowing down when it comes making a splash at its annual customer event. Now in its fourth year, Domopalooza featured an all-star music lineup with Pitbull, Nicole Scherzinger, Capital Cities, and NE-YO. Add to this a full ski day for customers, and it’s easy to position Domo as a company intent on burning through its investment funding in an attempt to attract customers and disrupt rivals Qlik, Tableau, IBM, et al.
Then again, as you might expect from an unpredictable company, Domo took a U-turn at this year’s show, unleashing a new branding campaign and new corporate tagline that is, shall we say, less than hip. As a matter of fact, it’s downright demanding. Exhibit A: the new corporate tagline is ‘For the Good of the Company.’ Rolled out globally at the show (along with a full site revamp and trucker hats emblazoned to match), this new tagline sounds quite heavy, and perhaps a bit condescending when viewed in isolation.
If you step back, however, and take a look at this amid the company’s broader go-to-market messaging, it begins to make sense. As described by CEO Josh James on the last day of the conference, the company’s new messaging in full is in fact:
- What: Domo is the operating system that allows you to run your entire business on your phone.
- How: It brings together data, systems, and people to finally deliver a digitally connected business.
- Why: Because when you use it, you are doing it for the good of the company.
In short, Domo seeks to help everyone from the CEO down to front-line workers connect to the right data, systems, and people – all for the good of the company.
The key here is Domo’s desire to bring together data, systems, and people. You might be tempted to think of systems as being data sources such as Oracle Eloqua or Marketo. That’s just table stakes; mind you, with 500+ data connectors in its arsenal, Domo has a particularly powerful story to tell on the integration front. Rather, for Domo, ‘systems’ refer to corporate transactional systems. It seems that Domo intends to weave data into actual business decisions, creating a feedback loop between user and system based on analytical insights.
This will likely come through the combination of Mr. Roboto (Domo’s AI platform) and its embedded analytics capability (Domo Everywhere), which help users make data-driven decisions and then take action on those in context and in real time without having to switch back and forth between applications.
Full integration like this is a ways off for Domo, and for many BI and data visualization/discovery vendors. But for Domo, which already possesses a solid data warehouse, data processing and integration engine, collaboration tools, and of course, analytics software, the end result promises to in fact be good for the business – an operating system for the business.
IT Connection 