What is our primary use case?
One of our internal customers is a capital finance team. Before we reached out to them, they were pretty much handling all their data in Excel sheets. Their data has been expanding rapidly and they needed reporting in a visualization solution. They have different forecast methodologies and cycles, and different metrics within those forecasts types. They have various types of capital metrics. If you are from a finance background, you might have heard of what an IOI or an NPV or an IRR is. They had been doing it in Excel.
Ideally, to fulfill their needs, you would need two different solutions. One is a transformation solution. When you are handling huge amounts of data, you certainly need a database and, most commonly, what you prefer is SQL. Once your transmission is complete, you would also need a visualization solution. There are many available in the market.
With Domo, we can do everything in one place. We don't need a separate database. We can do ETL and the visualization in one location.
It's not on a device. It is completely cloud-based. Since we are a healthcare provider, we chose the secure instance of the public cloud: a PSI-certified instance.
How has it helped my organization?
Instead of having two different products, one for data transformation and one for visualization, we are able to do those functions using this tool, with one person or two persons at the max.
The day before yesterday, one of the teams wanted to see how its employees were performing in their line of business. That team has around 140 employees, and wanted to see what their current roles are, what their future roles will be, what their primary skills are, and what their secondary skills are. All this time, they've been using Excel sheets and they take a week's time to process. We put in a one-time effort of one week and, going forward, that particular team doesn't have to spend an entire week to provide an analysis to its leadership. All they have to do, once their data is updated, is push it into Domo and all the metrics that they want to see are readily available. It hardly takes five minutes, instead of one week. For that team it is definitely a great thing because the product manager doesn't have to sit for a week and do that. It has definitely made his life easier.
The same thing applies to the finance team. Our finance team gets its data on the 10th or 11th of every month and when they had to process that data in Excel sheets for another 10 days, the month was almost over. Here, again, things now happen in a couple of hours, and their data is ready the very next day and they are ready to present their finance metrics to their leadership before the 15th of the month. Based on that, they can plan their next month, or the upcoming forecast for financial metrics, more efficiently. Now they have 20 days instead of 10 days.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is the ETL. With ETL transformations in SQL lists, you often write a lot of queries. You have to build a bunch of code for the data. With Domo, one of the pieces we have is Magic ETL. In Magic ETL, you don't need to write code. You don't need to be a specialist in SQL or any database query language. You just need to have common sense or to know how to use Excel and you can do a better job than a querying professional or a coding professional. Magic ETL is one of the best features I have ever seen in the ETL world.
Also, you can limit the users. Finance data is very critical so not everyone can be seeing it. We can create customized security options and provide privileged options to groups or a particular person, so only they can view things.
What needs improvement?
In Tableau, you can create virtually any kind of visualization. Based on your creativity, you can create a visualization on a human body structure, you can create a visualization on anything that you want. But Domo is limited to a few kinds of visualization views: standard things like bar, pie, and some other charts. You can't create something outside of the box. I would like to see them add new views for presenting the data in the visualization space. That definitely needs improvement. We have provided this input to the product owners at Domo, so let's see what comes out of that.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Domo for the last two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is very efficient and very good. So far, we haven't seen any outages. It's very fast and very interactive. No matter if we're dealing with millions and billions of rows of data, we never experience any lag, which is something we used to see in Tableau, Power BI, and other solutions. With Domo, never. It's as fast as you can imagine.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is scalable. Our company is a classic example of that. Our company deals with healthcare data for the entire United States, part of Canada, and some parts of South America, and additional international locations. So our data is huge. Really huge. I don't think any other organization deals with this much data. And Domo scales as much as you want.
We have around between 1,500 and 2,000 customers using this, and their roles range from CIOs to vice presidents, directors, analysts, and financial analysts. Currently, in our company, it is not being used as actively as Tableau, but we are expanding usage. When this product was introduced in our organization, we had a customer base of around 20 or 30 people; two or three different teams. We are further expanding it to the entire organization. Our target for this year is to have around 6,000 to 7,000 folks onboard.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
A few of our internal customers are using Tableau, a few are using QlikView, a few are using Power BI, and a few are using Domo. We have varied usage but we are trying to expand Domo to be used in place of the other tools.
How was the initial setup?
I was never part of the initial setup, but I think it's straightforward. As with anything that you're getting from the cloud, you only have to establish your data connections to the tool. We use several things, including Excel files. It should be a straightforward exercise, instead of taking time.
I have read about how it is done in other companies and what I've seen is that implementation took less than two days.
There is no specific maintenance for the solution. Two people can do the job for a large organization, because the only thing that you need to determine is how you want to give access and what kind of access. That is done by our customer success manager, and there is a product manager who takes care of who should be given a Domo license and who should not be, in our company.
What was our ROI?
We have seen ROI with Domo. For example, our finance team invested in Domo and they have saved around 20 days per month. They are now working more efficiently and their numbers have drastically changed compared to their previous year's performance. They can see how they're trending for the last month and they're efficiently planning their expenditures and forecasting accordingly.
Similarly, for our technology teams, we are doing different SLA metrics for incidents, problems, their availability, storage, etc. At one go they are now able to see the problem areas that are not performing and they can plan their technology maintenance accordingly. For some of the organizations within our company, their availability was around 91 percent. Against the standard of 99.9 percent available, they were losing 8 percent per month, which was going to cost us a lot in terms of penalties. They have identified their problem areas now and they are avoiding paying penalties.
Each of our internal customers has its own ROI like that.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
No matter if you're a developer or an end-user, the licensing cost is around $12 per user per month. I'm not aware of other costs but there would likely be some type of cost for the storage that we use, because we're using Domo's cloud storage.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Domo we evaluated other options, including Tableau and QlikView. But the problem with Tableau was that it was very slow. It was extremely slow because of the amount of data that we are trying to push in. It was not efficient and stable.
And the problem is with Tableau and QlikView is that you would need a separate ETL tool altogether, like SQL. With Domo we don't need that. We can directly talk to any kind of data source that is available in the market. That is what separates it from the others.
What other advice do I have?
The biggest lesson I have learned is that this makes the job very easy. To do some things in Tableau would take three days, but in Domo I do them in one day. It has made me a lazy person. But I'm now able to focus on other important things. I'm now learning other technologies whenever I have time. Domo has taught me that you shouldn't limit yourself to one area of expertise. You should always expand to new areas.
I would definitely suggest you consider Domo if you don't have any cost constraints. The way I see it, implementing Tableau is more expensive than using Domo. A Tableau user license, per annum, costs around $1,000, I think, in India. And then you need to have a Tableau server to publish the dashboards that you have developed. There is a lot of cost involved in that. This is a major selling point for Domo.
Also, with other dashboards, when you develop a new dashboard you have to develop a mobile version again, or you have to make some enhancements to a mobile version. But with Domo, you don't have to do that. What I've done on dashboards for the web works as well on the mobile application version. These are the things we pitch when we have an initial meeting with a potential new internal customer.
There aren't any version names, as such, for the product that we use here. All the updates and features get upgraded. Before any new feature is going to be released into the production version, we get to review the beta version of it. Based on the feedback from the customer, we decide whether we want to have that featured in our instance or not. So it's not like we have a version one, two, or three, rather that the features get updated as and when required.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Domo does build a handful of cards off the bat, but I have built over 1000 cards, 100 data sources, 30 data flows, and a couple of Domo apps in their beta environment. Ad-hoc is so quick and easy that I can build them while in a meeting with stakeholders.