Last week on the way to Domopalooza 2017, I stopped at Snowbasin Resort for a couple hours to ski the slush and get some sun. It was a warm, breezy day up at 9000’, and I was quite comfortable in just shorts and a flannel. By the time I left the mountain and pulled into the Grand American hotel in Salt Lake City, it was 75 degrees. Having spent the winter in the cold, dark state of Montana, I was uncomfortably hot and eager to get out of the sun.

I lucked out. I entered the hotel, and the air-conditioned, light blue world of Domopalooza 2017 engulfed me. Fifteen foot signs with customer quotes in blue print hung over head. The glass chandeliers that hung from every room and hallway sparkled with blue light. Domo employees adorned in Domo gear stood throughout the conference halls eager to answer any questions. Over the following two and a half days, Domopalooza attendees were treated to two concerts, three nights of open bars, free swag, and mouth-watering food. 

Between the partying, Domo announced a number of new features and provided a sneak peak of four intriguing tools that will launch later this year. I also managed to speak with over twenty Domo customers. My conversations became predictable. I would ask, “What do you like about Domo?” and they would rattle on about this and that. But then I would ask, “What don’t you like about Domo” or “How could Domo improve?” and customers would hold their chin, look at the ground, and take a full 20 seconds before answering. 

But before proceeding . . .

What is DOMO?

The Company

Founded in 2010 in American Fork, Utah, Domo has 800 employees and multiple partners. Domo has raised $589 million in five rounds from 41 investors, according to crunchbase.com, and has enjoyed a 100% year-over-year growth rate for several years.

Domo executives admit that most of the BI gunslinging in the industry today is between Microsoft and Tableau. But the executives believe that will change as more customers embrace the cloud. According to Founder and CEO Josh James, “Domo is by far the largest analytics cloud platform, storing 100 trillion rows of data from all its customers in the last 12 months.” That equates to 25 petabytes of data. This confidence is also backed by Domo’s cult following of customers, also known as ‘domosapiens’, who collectively praised Domo’s offering throughout Domopalooza.

The Product

Domo is a business intelligence tool that runs on Domo’s Business Cloud platform. The tool is designed to consolidate an organization’s data into one easy-to-use, self-service solution for all business roles, so anyone can access the data they need and make better decisions.

The platform is divided into five segments: connect, prepare, visualize, engage, and optimize. Domo offers over 400 ready-to-use connectors to almost any data source imaginable. To prepare data, Domo has an onboard ETL tool dubbed Magic ETL. Business users have hundreds of different visualizations and charts to choose from when building cards. Buzz is Domo’s collaboration platform so users can share and collaborate within Domo. Optimize refers to features that help users run their businesses more efficiently, such as the 1,000+ pre-built apps.

Customer Reactions

From the keynote stage to the exhibition hall, three positive reactions emerged from Domo customers.

“It’s so easy to use”

When asked, “What do you like about Domo?” most customers immediately responded, “it’s so easy to use.” Many others added, “You can pick up Domo in a day” and “It’s so much easier to use than Tableau.”

Many customers had previously used Tableau (and other tools) or tried it before deploying Domo. An individual giving a keynote presentation said, “We worked really hard to make it [Tableau] work because so many people were using it, but it wasn’t cutting it.”

When customers elaborated on Domo’s ease of use, many pointed to how simple it was to access the data they needed, build visualizations, and compile the visualizations into cards. Others talked about the application design studio and the pre-built applications, which make it fast and simple to build an operational application. Some pointed to the speed at which Domo delivers queries, allowing them to continue to focus on the task at hand without interruption.

“It’s so easy to implement”

One customer said, “It’s easy to launch and aggregate data quickly,” and many others agreed. Customers seemed satisfied with the hundreds of available connectors and many praised Magic ETL.

On stage, Dave Katz, General Manager of programmatic Revenue and Operations at Univision Communications Inc., said Domo automated a weekly enterprise report in two weeks. Previously an analyst built the report from scratch each time. The new report enables executives to drill from summary views of data to details, unlike the previous report. Katz also noted Univision analysts usually spend 80% of their time aggregating data before they can manipulate and visualize it, but “with Domo, aggregation happened inside a week.”

“You can use it in all parts of your business”

Partners like Domo’s versatility. “Domo is good for all use cases in all industries,” said one partner. From executives to business users, Domo satisfied everyone’s needs. Customers and keynote speakers spoke of Domo adoption starting from both the C suite level and rank-and-file business users. According to the same customers, no matter where Domo was first adopted, it tended to spread across their organizations.

What’s Left to be Desired?

Some customers and partners said they would like an on-premises version of Domo to address security concerns and alleviated data movement issues.

Customers often did not have an answer when asked what Domo could do better or add. A few potential customers driven by security concerns and/or a lack of willingness to move large amounts of data mentioned they would like an on-premise version.

Aside from on-premise requests, when I spoke to customers there were no consistent complaints.

However, on the final day of the conference, a panel of Domo executives got live feedback from the audience about their concerns and requests. Most of the requests for new features were fairly minor and no one offered scathing criticism or deep dissatisfaction. Some of the requested features include:

• A standard way to certify cards
• Vertical communities to learn best practices from peers
• An easier way to navigate columns
• More publicly documented APIs
• An administration page for beast mode functions
• Schema on dataflows
• Confidence intervals on charts
• Ability to filter on an aggregated field
• The ability to organize and tag data sets

New Features

Domo made several new announcements at the conference:

1. Analyzer Tool Gets Upgrades

• Period-over-period analysis allows users to compare current activity to different periods in time. Before users manually overlaid results to compare.
• With data lineage users can see the history of data, including the sources it came from and actions done to it. This way, users can validate the quality of the data and see how the data was blended together.
• Analysts can use data slicing to do dimensional analysis, i.e. examine data by common business dimensions, such as sales, region, product, etc. Filters already existed in Domo to perform these actions, but the data slicing feature makes dimensional analysis easier and faster for business decision makers to view.
• An additional 60 new chart families allow users to create new chart types and adds new colors.
• Annotations let users write directly on top of a visualization or add notes below one, so users can convey their opinions of visualizations more clearly.

2. Business-in-a-Box

The Business-in-a-Box feature contains sets of pre-installed dashboards designed for different business departments such as finance, marketing, and sales. Skipping the report production process lets users deploy the dashboards they likely need without delay.

3. Domo Everywhere

• White Label allows an organization to offer Domo to customers or partners, but in a platform containing the organization’s brand. This way, a partner can use Domo within the host organization’s website and not realize they are using Domo.
• Organizations can use Domo Embed to share visualizations and datasets with anyone that may need them. This can be done by copying and pasting a domo link to a website or into an application. Once embedded, the users can still use the visualization to drill down.
• Domo Publish allows for secure and selective sharing. Customers can create log-ins with restricted access for individuals or groups who only need certain information or capabilities.

Coming Soon

Finally, during the last keynote Domo executives provided a sneak peak of four new features ranging from natural language generation to data science capabilities that piqued everyone’s interest, judging by the loud applause.

1. Mr. Roboto (expected late spring)

Mr. Roboto is a set of artificial intelligence capabilities, which will power the upcoming Alert Center and data science tools (mentioned below). These capabilities will provide users with more advanced insights. 

Included is an NLG tool that automatically answers basic questions about a visualization. In the on-stage demo, the presenter selected a visualization, and four common questions with corresponding answers appeared alongside the visualization. Users will have the option of changing the questions. With Mr. Roboto, users will spend less time developing answers that need to be communicated.

2. Alert Center (expected late spring)

Alert Center offers a cockpit view of activity happening in the Domo platform throughout an organization. The feature displays a news feed and topical heat map of activity, such as changes to a visualization, new cards, and data modifications. Users can also see trending events and subscribe to alerts to keep updated on the latest and relevant events.

3. Approval Center (expected later this year)

Approval center is a central location for reports and dashboards that need to be approved, speeding up the vetting process.

4. Data Science Capabilities (expected later this year)

Soon, users will be able to see how different factors affect the performance of a metric. For example, a customer could see how factors, such as a customer’s annual income or the amount of advertising he sees, affects their renewal rate. The new feature will enable Domo customers to change the value of the factors and automatically see the impact on the metric. For example, increasing a customer’s annual income results in an increase in customer renewal rates.