Josh James Hires Old Omniture Buddy Harrington as Domo President
Domo, the business intelligence start-up helmed by Josh James, the former CEO of Omniture, has tapped James’s old friend and former Omniture president Chris Harrington to be its president.
The pair ran Omniture together for eight years during the company’s most exciting phase. James co-founded Omniture in 1996, and took it public in 2006. He tapped Harrington as president of worldwide sales and client services in 2002, a job he held until 2009. During that time, Harrington is credited with pushing Omniture’s annual recurring revenue from $4 million to north of $500 million. They sold the company to Adobe that year for $1.8 billion.
James bolted Adobe in 2009, quickly raised money, and bought out a Utah-based outfit called Corda that he soon set about remaking as Domo.
Harrington said in a company statement, “This time around, I wanted to build a bigger company than what we created at Omniture and be part of a game-changing organization that could forever re-define the face of enterprise technology.” Omniture was all about Web analytics. Domo is all about bringing the power of analytics to the enterprise, though it’s far from alone in that space. There are companies like GoodData, Birst and Tidemark, and those are just the start-ups. The other big name in the space is IBM.
The ever-effusive James compared the reunion to that of other great pairs in cultural history: Starsky and Hutch, Laverne and Shirley. “Some pairs work really well together,” James said in the announcement. “With Chris as president, I can guarantee two things: we’ll be going after this opportunity as hard as we can, and we’ll be having a lot of fun doing it.”
And well-funded fun, at that. Domo has raised $63 million, including a $20 million round from Institutional Venture Partners at an implied valuation of what James said at the time was “upward of a couple hundred million” early this year. Other investors include Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angel, Hummer Winblad, and a bunch of personal investments.
