Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist at CSS Corp
MSP
Top 10
2024-02-20T09:23:44Z
Feb 20, 2024
The solution is deployed on the cloud in our organization. The solution's visualization feature is good and meets whatever most of our customers want. It has all the standard charts and typical drill-downs, and it's quite easy. I would recommend the solution to other people who are considering using it. Overall, I rate Domo a nine out of ten.
I rate the solution a nine out of ten. I advise new users to define a few folks on the IT side that are comfortable dealing with implementations in the cloud instead of on-premises.
Manager of Program Operations at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2019-12-16T08:14:00Z
Dec 16, 2019
Go all-in with it and really let Domo take over and fill it out for you. Don't hesitate. You may think it's a challenge or it's a lot of work to get it implemented. Don't sit on it, don't hesitate. Let them do the work with their implementation services. Ultimately, if you want, they can do everything for you. Get everything upfront. In my department, Domo is used daily. I represent a small portion of the larger company and we haven't extended outside of our department yet. We're still flushing everything through us. I rate Domo a 10 out of 10 because of the ease of use and the way that it's geared towards users such as myself. It's not really steeped in IT lingo.
Vice President at Indium Software - Independent Software Testing Company
Real User
2022-11-01T19:41:01Z
Nov 1, 2022
For mid-size or small customers, this is absolutely fine. However, this product has not been tested on a robust enterprise-scale application where we handle billions and billions of records. So this is where we see the application breathing out a bit. I would rate Domo an eight out of ten.
Pay very close attention to your data catalog development. Do your best to drive towards a common data catalog across the entire enterprise. So you do not have data that is tagged similarly from different data sets. I would rate Domo a seven out of ten.
Domo doesn't have a version because it's completely on the cloud, even if there's a change in the backend. It doesn't have any software that you need to install as Domo itself is a cloud tool. My company is a Domo implementer with eight to ten projects executed, and with every project, there's a minimum of twenty-five to thirty end users of Domo, but the company has forty certified Domo developers. Every developer supports, on average, ten different users, so overall, the tool has three hundred to four hundred users. The main reason my company decided to use Domo is that it's a one-stop shop BI tool, so it solves requirements for all customers. It can also integrate with any data source, and it's the only tool so far that can integrate with more than one thousand five hundred different data characters. Another reason why my company chose Domo is because of the look and feel of the dashboard which is easy for the end-users to understand. Domo made it very simple. The tool is what people need as it has more algorithms and gives effective results. My advice to anyone planning to use Domo for the first time is to just get on a call with the Domo team and explain your requirement in detail. The Domo team will give you a demo, and after understanding the demo, you have to explain any problems and your requirements, so the Domo team will understand, and depending on your requirements and data sources, the team will suggest the particular approach you can take. This is what you have to keep in mind before you approach the Domo team for implementation. My rating for Domo is eight out of ten because it's a cloud-based tool that's good for data security and it's user-friendly. Any other BI tool expert can easily learn the tool and start working on it. Domo has a drag-and-drop approach, so you don't have to be technically skilled to learn it. My company is a partner of Domo.
I rate this solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice, I would recommend going with the cloud version and something seamless. Also, leverage the dashboard, and explore it. There might be an initial learning curve, so ensure you have enough buffer time to learn.
It's too early for me to comment in detail because there may be some functions which I have not explored yet, especially in terms of windows and fixing a formula. LODs and windows are one thing, but I'm not sure if there are other functionalities which I have yet to come across. But if you are looking for a very quick solution, and if you also want some ETL activities — if you don't have a dedicated ETL team — definitely go for Domo, rather than Tableau. Domo gives you that ETL advantage. Also, in terms of mobile usage and visualizations, Domo has an advantage. If you already have a dedicated ETL team and you want to go into specific reports and some customization of reports, Tableau would be the choice.
Business Analyst at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2020-03-15T08:07:00Z
Mar 15, 2020
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.
Senior Reporting Analyst at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2020-03-05T08:39:00Z
Mar 5, 2020
It produces the best output. I'm quite satisfied with the tool. We take the initiative, on our end, to give the client the best insights on how to use Domo. If they are sharing Domo access, we help them to understand how they can best use the tool and how they can change the chart visualizations, to make them suitable for their review and for understanding. Those are the key factors where we advise clients so that, with the click of a button, they have their own insights coming in. The end-users at our clients include program managers, in particular, and then the top level, the executive level. Most of our clients have around five users. The tool is very popular in the Asia-Pacific region. It's spreading its wings. Even in India, I've seen people starting to use this tool. The major advantages are its GUI and that it's in the cloud. The visualization features, with its colors, are friendly to the eye. It doesn't display information in dark colors. I would definitely be curious to explore Domo more and more because it has features such as data scientist rules. You can apply their forecasting. I intend to explore those areas more.
Business Analyst at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2020-03-04T08:49:00Z
Mar 4, 2020
Go for it. The product is quite good. I would rate it as a seven and a half (out of 10). It makes things more attractive and simpler. When you come to the analytics part, you want things to be simpler because there are other areas that you want to focus on than just creating a dashboard.
Senior Software Engineer at a real estate/law firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2020-02-23T06:17:00Z
Feb 23, 2020
There are more than 500 people using it in our company, although that's just a rough estimate. They are mostly in high-level management: SVPs, VPs, and CFOs. And it doesn't take many people to support and maintain it. It's low-maintenance. It's a good tool, overall. I would rate it at seven out of 10. There are a few features that Domo doesn't have. If they keep on adding features and work on the UI, that could make it a 10. I would rate Tableau higher.
Project Manager at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees
Real User
2020-01-14T06:40:00Z
Jan 14, 2020
Domo even has a built-in Agile-scrum Kanban functionality. I don't want to say it's a lesson we've learned, because they've been doing this a long time, but it reaffirmed that while a lot of companies are still doing Waterfall, and the traditional "Where's your Gant chart and your Microsoft Project?" approach, I rebuffed that. Domo has upped that and I use a hybrid scrum, like Agile. The biggest thing that I learned was from our sister company that loaded Domo up first. They tried to boil the ocean. They used a traditional approach and said, "Oh, requirements, and we have these 50 reports we want to put in Domo." They had all of the status updates in a traditional Microsoft Project structure, with PowerPoint slides to present to leadership and spreadsheets to track issues. They put so much overhead on themselves. But they were behind schedule, plus they used Domo consulting. So the biggest lesson is this: You want to have the business create the content for the business. That's why we picked this tool. You don't want to have someone else involved, whether it's a consultant, or IT, and here's why. In every business department, there is the person who is creating the pivot tables, knows Access, and has the aptitude to create this content. The benefit of that person doing it is that they know the business. And with Domo, they don't have to go fill out some project-request with IT or some other organization and say, "Oh, we want a new report or a new card." Then, that other organization has to review it and put it in their backlog of work. And when they get to it they have to have requirements-gathering and all of this discussion. Finally, there's a document that meets the requirements and they say, "Okay, now let's create a draft." Back-and-forth, traditional Waterfall takes forever. I had someone come up to me and say, "Hey, John, we need XYZ." In 15 minutes I had created new content. But it's still controlled because we have a very small structure, a core team, which has key content creators from each critical business unit and those people have the poetic license to do as they please. It's so much quicker. That's why we've been able to implement so much. Domo is not like traditional software development where you're "pouring concrete" and you better get the forms designed and measured perfectly, because once that concrete sets it's a bear to have to break it out, and reform, and repour. With Domo, it's more like molding clay. So when someone says, "Oh, well, I don't like that." "Okay, let me change the color," or, "Let me change this. Let me add a filter." It's all on-the-fly and very dynamic. So the biggest lesson is that, when you get something like this, don't turn it into traditional, stodgy, bureaucratic Waterfall. I had to spend very little time providing status updates. I had the risks and issues in Domo, using the project functionality that is free and that comes with it. The list of all of the things that we wanted to consider was in the Kanban and to-do backlog, and then in-progress, and completed. It was so easy to do it organically, starting small, versus, "Oh, what are all the 50 reports we want replace with Domo?" IT is just there to support us when we need data from some huge enterprise system. They'll say, "Oh yeah. Let us set up an automatic feed into Domo." You can tell I'm a big advocate for Domo. I'm not alone. Every time I show it to someone they go crazy over it and they want more. It's harder to find someone who is not excited about it, in terms of both the content users and the content creators. There is competition because we're a global company. One division has been using Microsoft Power BI, another is using Sisense, and we have one plant using Tableau. I think it's going to evolve. I foresee that Domo will be around, unless there's some bizarre, unforeseeable event. I can't see Domo going away anytime soon. Regarding maintenance, in terms of the solution itself, we don't need anyone because it's software as a service. In terms of the content, we have, for example, two people in the whole of the quality assurance and warranty group who are part of this core team. We have two people from the sales team who do all of the business planning content stuff. When we added to the credit department, we added someone in that department who maintains all of that content. Is it a full-time job for them? Not even close, but they're responsible for it. On the engineering side, it's mostly me, but I'm also leading the whole initiative. Right now, the core team has six people, and then we have a stakeholders' committee that is going to start meeting once a month. We were meeting more frequently during the first year. There's a slightly wider audience of about 15 people who are going to be invited to update them on the status, what we're working on, and to find out if they have any questions. But it's a very small overhead. It's a resource-saving thing. The headcount that was creating all of this content before was a small army, because every director and senior manager had to do their own little flavor of the reporting.
Manager - Talent Acquisition Analytics at Sutherland Global Services
MSP
2019-05-09T13:12:00Z
May 9, 2019
Domo is a great tool, in my opinion. But the first thing that you need to consider is what kind of return on investment Domo can deliver. There are a lot of things that Domo can deliver. There are a lot of things that I haven't tried yet with Domo and I'm quite excited about trying them. But in terms of the ROI, there's a really great opportunity to save cost and time with Domo, particularly for if you are heavy on reports. If your organization needs certain data or reports in real-time, reports that help you to decide on certain issues, Domo can be helpful. For the setup, the first thing that really matters to me is the importance of the fundamentals and training for users. If a user has not been well-trained to provide technical explanations to other users who eventually join the organization, it's quite difficult to understand Domo. When I joined this organization, they had already been using for Domo but for less than a year. In terms of the reports, they are not utilizing it fully because they don't have any dedicated person to handle it. In addition, they don't have any trained personnel here, so there's no one to set up the reports, there's no one to explore the functionality of the system. It's quite a challenging role. We have been working on overcoming those issues. As for increased usage in the future, we have a mandate from management that we're eventually shifting everything, all the reports, into this platform, because of its usefulness. It's quite good and I think the organization supports it. It is being used globally in our organization. We have counterparts in other regions including India, Bulgaria, and the US. Our team alone has more than ten people who handle the business analytics. We are the ones preparing our records and data in Domo for all talent acquisitions for this organization. I would rate Domo at eight out of ten. It's really quite helpful for me to use Domo. Domo helps a lot in terms of reports and streamlining the reporting process. It helps the organization to make decisions quickly.
Software Developer at CapitalVia Global Research Limited
Real User
2019-02-12T10:09:00Z
Feb 12, 2019
It's easy to use. There's no need for Google or videos to learn something. You can just explore it and do whatever you want and it's very easy to understand with a good interface. We have kept the number of users to not more than 15. We have kept it confidential and not made it available to the employees. We are planning to increase usage of Domo. We had a lot of negotiations with the team that was helpful regarding the sharing of a particular dashboard with other people. We have a one-user subscription and we want to share this with another one so that they can at least have a look at the performance in the organization. We are planning to share Domo with the employees. We have between 300 and 500 employees. Our target is that by the next financial year we will deploy this product throughout the organization.
Project Manager at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees
Real User
2019-01-31T08:49:00Z
Jan 31, 2019
One thing from my experience that we could have improved was that we had a limited number of technical people on it. You definitely need to be savvy with a lot of heavy SQL as well as API integrations. if you're trying to utilize it the most, the best thing to do is utilize their development platform. They have a developers page that really does wonders and takes it to the next step. If you're investing in it, then invest in being able to utilize that. They also have a webpage where they show a lot of examples with different data models, showing you how to utilize tools to the best of their capabilities. That is really great as well. The UI is definitely easy to pick up. If you do have a little bit of SQL experience, it's easier to use, rather than trying your own merge capability. It has its own user interface where you can do what you would initially do with queries or Redshift. That part is pretty good. But I prefer to use Domo's SQL and Redshift capabilities that require a little bit of coding, compared to what it has in its user interface, which allows similar processes. That being said, everything else has been really easy and very self-explanatory. They do have good documentation and they have user groups and discussion boards that provide a lot of answers to your questions. I definitely see use of the solution growing. There's so much more that it can be used for. There's a lot of predictive analysis that it can go into, and a lot of connectors that it can work with that allow you to use more and more functionalities and help with that whole predictive analysis aspect. In my previous organization, when I was there, they were growing the team to focus on what they could do with Domo. Overall, Domo really transformed how we worked with data. Things that would normally take three or four weeks could be set up to take a day or two, if not less. The fact that it was able to take a whole workload off and provide a lot of analysis and even further insight, in that shorter amount of time, was great.
Domo is a good tool, and you won't regret it if you chose it for your company, since it is a very useful tool if you want to check your data constantly and historically. You can compare and create graphics to compare the past with the present and estimate to see how your company is performing. Right now, the data is the most important thing in the world. Domo always tries to keep your data protected and available to you and your clients. This is something which good with Domo. As our company increases in size, our usage of Domo will increase. We use Datadog in conjunction with Domo, but they are two separate tools: Datadog is used for checking issues in the databases and Domo is used for uploading data from the databases. E.g., Datadog will inform you what is going on every second in the databases. It provides information if something is wrong or if one of the processes hasn't finished.
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
2019-01-22T09:53:00Z
Jan 22, 2019
Implementing Domo depends on the project, how much time it will take to build the dashboards, how many KPIs you are looking at, and how much of your data will come into the system. It also matters how many data sources there are. If you have ten to 15 sources every time it is a lot of work because you need to join all those tables and combine them into one to build the dashboards on top of it. There is a difference between working with Domo and working on top of Domo. The major difference is that if you are working with Domo, you would rather use ETL and work with connectors; build the database and then dashboards for internal systems, sales, HR, marketing, and the website. That is working with Domo. But working outside of Domo, you just the APIs to push the data or the dashboard data, and you work on it on top of it. In our organization, I am the one who works with Domo the most. Our organization is pretty small. We are a startup still. For startups, there is no discount. There is a trial version but that is only for 30 days. If you want to use a basic system, go with AWS QuickSight because it is available with pay-as-you-go and it is way less, in comparison, because it is new in the market. I would rate Domo at six out of ten. I'm not in love with Domo. I have some issues with it. In my opinion, it is not that secure. I feel it is exposed a little. I also feel the ETL is a little outdated. They're not up to the mark on updating and don't have support for multiple languages. For example, they only support for Java right now. They don't even support Python or .NET.
If you implement Domo, go full-on with Domo and let go of all the legacy stuff. The big mistake is that you implement Domo and then you have something else as well. If you're thinking of consolidating analytics, go full-on because Domo can solve everything when it comes to data-handling, analytics, business intelligence, and reporting, etc. My advice would be: Have the courage to let go of all the old stuff. I'm a big fan in many ways. I'm not a techie in that sense, I'm more a CEO. But I'm a big ambassador of Domo. When you compare storage, for example, you have Dell EMC and then you have all the others. In business intelligence, you have Domo and then you have the others. That's how I see it. If the company I now work for, a new startup, ever grows to the size we need it to be, then I would be an ambassador for Domo again. Or if I was running a company, I would look at implementing Domo pretty quickly to get a really crisp understanding of how the business makes money, and what we can do to make more. Every organization is different, so you would probably use it differently depending on what you do. My old startup was a very sales-heavy business. It was a lot about sales and customer data and the like. In another organization, you might use different kinds of analytics and business intelligence. How you use it really depends on what you do. I would give it a ten out of ten. If you've actually lived the "Domo life," it's hard to get along with anything else after that. It is that good.
Manager of Data Analytics & CRM Operations at CSI
Vendor
2018-12-19T09:19:00Z
Dec 19, 2018
Don't complicate it. At first we thought it was going to be a lot more complicated. It just wasn't. Knowing that, next time, would help me a lot, instead of trying to plan so much for every detail. It was a lot easier than I expected and we spent a lot of time testing stuff and figuring out if the tool was updating. If we had trusted what they were saying, we would have finished a lot faster. If you don't have a lot of data changing, if your structures are not changing - some companies keep changing the way they structure their data and that will take a lot of time - maintenance isn't that bad. I spend about ten hours a week on maintenance of the solution, and we are running a really big implementation. It's mostly answering user questions. There haven't really been any problems. I am able to work on that and on other projects at the same time. I am able to maintain it with very minimal work. Overall, I'd give it an eight out ten. From easy usability to documentation to pricing, it's pretty much all there.
Domo is a cloud-based, mobile-first BI platform that helps companies drive more value from their data by helping organizations better integrate, interpret and use data to drive timely decision making and action across the business. The Domo platform enhances existing data warehouse and BI tools and allows users to build custom apps, automate data pipelines, and make data science accessible for anyone through automated insights that can be shared with internal or external stakeholders.
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I would recommend Domo. It is okay for dashboard use and easy to use. I'd rate the solution six out of ten.
The solution is deployed on the cloud in our organization. The solution's visualization feature is good and meets whatever most of our customers want. It has all the standard charts and typical drill-downs, and it's quite easy. I would recommend the solution to other people who are considering using it. Overall, I rate Domo a nine out of ten.
I recommend the solution to others. It provides data security and has good use cases. I rate it as a seven.
I rate the solution a seven out of ten. The solution is good, but the price can be improved.
I rate the solution a nine out of ten. I advise new users to define a few folks on the IT side that are comfortable dealing with implementations in the cloud instead of on-premises.
Go all-in with it and really let Domo take over and fill it out for you. Don't hesitate. You may think it's a challenge or it's a lot of work to get it implemented. Don't sit on it, don't hesitate. Let them do the work with their implementation services. Ultimately, if you want, they can do everything for you. Get everything upfront. In my department, Domo is used daily. I represent a small portion of the larger company and we haven't extended outside of our department yet. We're still flushing everything through us. I rate Domo a 10 out of 10 because of the ease of use and the way that it's geared towards users such as myself. It's not really steeped in IT lingo.
For mid-size or small customers, this is absolutely fine. However, this product has not been tested on a robust enterprise-scale application where we handle billions and billions of records. So this is where we see the application breathing out a bit. I would rate Domo an eight out of ten.
Pay very close attention to your data catalog development. Do your best to drive towards a common data catalog across the entire enterprise. So you do not have data that is tagged similarly from different data sets. I would rate Domo a seven out of ten.
Domo doesn't have a version because it's completely on the cloud, even if there's a change in the backend. It doesn't have any software that you need to install as Domo itself is a cloud tool. My company is a Domo implementer with eight to ten projects executed, and with every project, there's a minimum of twenty-five to thirty end users of Domo, but the company has forty certified Domo developers. Every developer supports, on average, ten different users, so overall, the tool has three hundred to four hundred users. The main reason my company decided to use Domo is that it's a one-stop shop BI tool, so it solves requirements for all customers. It can also integrate with any data source, and it's the only tool so far that can integrate with more than one thousand five hundred different data characters. Another reason why my company chose Domo is because of the look and feel of the dashboard which is easy for the end-users to understand. Domo made it very simple. The tool is what people need as it has more algorithms and gives effective results. My advice to anyone planning to use Domo for the first time is to just get on a call with the Domo team and explain your requirement in detail. The Domo team will give you a demo, and after understanding the demo, you have to explain any problems and your requirements, so the Domo team will understand, and depending on your requirements and data sources, the team will suggest the particular approach you can take. This is what you have to keep in mind before you approach the Domo team for implementation. My rating for Domo is eight out of ten because it's a cloud-based tool that's good for data security and it's user-friendly. Any other BI tool expert can easily learn the tool and start working on it. Domo has a drag-and-drop approach, so you don't have to be technically skilled to learn it. My company is a partner of Domo.
I rate this solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice, I would recommend going with the cloud version and something seamless. Also, leverage the dashboard, and explore it. There might be an initial learning curve, so ensure you have enough buffer time to learn.
It's too early for me to comment in detail because there may be some functions which I have not explored yet, especially in terms of windows and fixing a formula. LODs and windows are one thing, but I'm not sure if there are other functionalities which I have yet to come across. But if you are looking for a very quick solution, and if you also want some ETL activities — if you don't have a dedicated ETL team — definitely go for Domo, rather than Tableau. Domo gives you that ETL advantage. Also, in terms of mobile usage and visualizations, Domo has an advantage. If you already have a dedicated ETL team and you want to go into specific reports and some customization of reports, Tableau would be the choice.
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.
It produces the best output. I'm quite satisfied with the tool. We take the initiative, on our end, to give the client the best insights on how to use Domo. If they are sharing Domo access, we help them to understand how they can best use the tool and how they can change the chart visualizations, to make them suitable for their review and for understanding. Those are the key factors where we advise clients so that, with the click of a button, they have their own insights coming in. The end-users at our clients include program managers, in particular, and then the top level, the executive level. Most of our clients have around five users. The tool is very popular in the Asia-Pacific region. It's spreading its wings. Even in India, I've seen people starting to use this tool. The major advantages are its GUI and that it's in the cloud. The visualization features, with its colors, are friendly to the eye. It doesn't display information in dark colors. I would definitely be curious to explore Domo more and more because it has features such as data scientist rules. You can apply their forecasting. I intend to explore those areas more.
Go for it. The product is quite good. I would rate it as a seven and a half (out of 10). It makes things more attractive and simpler. When you come to the analytics part, you want things to be simpler because there are other areas that you want to focus on than just creating a dashboard.
There are more than 500 people using it in our company, although that's just a rough estimate. They are mostly in high-level management: SVPs, VPs, and CFOs. And it doesn't take many people to support and maintain it. It's low-maintenance. It's a good tool, overall. I would rate it at seven out of 10. There are a few features that Domo doesn't have. If they keep on adding features and work on the UI, that could make it a 10. I would rate Tableau higher.
Domo even has a built-in Agile-scrum Kanban functionality. I don't want to say it's a lesson we've learned, because they've been doing this a long time, but it reaffirmed that while a lot of companies are still doing Waterfall, and the traditional "Where's your Gant chart and your Microsoft Project?" approach, I rebuffed that. Domo has upped that and I use a hybrid scrum, like Agile. The biggest thing that I learned was from our sister company that loaded Domo up first. They tried to boil the ocean. They used a traditional approach and said, "Oh, requirements, and we have these 50 reports we want to put in Domo." They had all of the status updates in a traditional Microsoft Project structure, with PowerPoint slides to present to leadership and spreadsheets to track issues. They put so much overhead on themselves. But they were behind schedule, plus they used Domo consulting. So the biggest lesson is this: You want to have the business create the content for the business. That's why we picked this tool. You don't want to have someone else involved, whether it's a consultant, or IT, and here's why. In every business department, there is the person who is creating the pivot tables, knows Access, and has the aptitude to create this content. The benefit of that person doing it is that they know the business. And with Domo, they don't have to go fill out some project-request with IT or some other organization and say, "Oh, we want a new report or a new card." Then, that other organization has to review it and put it in their backlog of work. And when they get to it they have to have requirements-gathering and all of this discussion. Finally, there's a document that meets the requirements and they say, "Okay, now let's create a draft." Back-and-forth, traditional Waterfall takes forever. I had someone come up to me and say, "Hey, John, we need XYZ." In 15 minutes I had created new content. But it's still controlled because we have a very small structure, a core team, which has key content creators from each critical business unit and those people have the poetic license to do as they please. It's so much quicker. That's why we've been able to implement so much. Domo is not like traditional software development where you're "pouring concrete" and you better get the forms designed and measured perfectly, because once that concrete sets it's a bear to have to break it out, and reform, and repour. With Domo, it's more like molding clay. So when someone says, "Oh, well, I don't like that." "Okay, let me change the color," or, "Let me change this. Let me add a filter." It's all on-the-fly and very dynamic. So the biggest lesson is that, when you get something like this, don't turn it into traditional, stodgy, bureaucratic Waterfall. I had to spend very little time providing status updates. I had the risks and issues in Domo, using the project functionality that is free and that comes with it. The list of all of the things that we wanted to consider was in the Kanban and to-do backlog, and then in-progress, and completed. It was so easy to do it organically, starting small, versus, "Oh, what are all the 50 reports we want replace with Domo?" IT is just there to support us when we need data from some huge enterprise system. They'll say, "Oh yeah. Let us set up an automatic feed into Domo." You can tell I'm a big advocate for Domo. I'm not alone. Every time I show it to someone they go crazy over it and they want more. It's harder to find someone who is not excited about it, in terms of both the content users and the content creators. There is competition because we're a global company. One division has been using Microsoft Power BI, another is using Sisense, and we have one plant using Tableau. I think it's going to evolve. I foresee that Domo will be around, unless there's some bizarre, unforeseeable event. I can't see Domo going away anytime soon. Regarding maintenance, in terms of the solution itself, we don't need anyone because it's software as a service. In terms of the content, we have, for example, two people in the whole of the quality assurance and warranty group who are part of this core team. We have two people from the sales team who do all of the business planning content stuff. When we added to the credit department, we added someone in that department who maintains all of that content. Is it a full-time job for them? Not even close, but they're responsible for it. On the engineering side, it's mostly me, but I'm also leading the whole initiative. Right now, the core team has six people, and then we have a stakeholders' committee that is going to start meeting once a month. We were meeting more frequently during the first year. There's a slightly wider audience of about 15 people who are going to be invited to update them on the status, what we're working on, and to find out if they have any questions. But it's a very small overhead. It's a resource-saving thing. The headcount that was creating all of this content before was a small army, because every director and senior manager had to do their own little flavor of the reporting.
Domo is a great tool, in my opinion. But the first thing that you need to consider is what kind of return on investment Domo can deliver. There are a lot of things that Domo can deliver. There are a lot of things that I haven't tried yet with Domo and I'm quite excited about trying them. But in terms of the ROI, there's a really great opportunity to save cost and time with Domo, particularly for if you are heavy on reports. If your organization needs certain data or reports in real-time, reports that help you to decide on certain issues, Domo can be helpful. For the setup, the first thing that really matters to me is the importance of the fundamentals and training for users. If a user has not been well-trained to provide technical explanations to other users who eventually join the organization, it's quite difficult to understand Domo. When I joined this organization, they had already been using for Domo but for less than a year. In terms of the reports, they are not utilizing it fully because they don't have any dedicated person to handle it. In addition, they don't have any trained personnel here, so there's no one to set up the reports, there's no one to explore the functionality of the system. It's quite a challenging role. We have been working on overcoming those issues. As for increased usage in the future, we have a mandate from management that we're eventually shifting everything, all the reports, into this platform, because of its usefulness. It's quite good and I think the organization supports it. It is being used globally in our organization. We have counterparts in other regions including India, Bulgaria, and the US. Our team alone has more than ten people who handle the business analytics. We are the ones preparing our records and data in Domo for all talent acquisitions for this organization. I would rate Domo at eight out of ten. It's really quite helpful for me to use Domo. Domo helps a lot in terms of reports and streamlining the reporting process. It helps the organization to make decisions quickly.
It's easy to use. There's no need for Google or videos to learn something. You can just explore it and do whatever you want and it's very easy to understand with a good interface. We have kept the number of users to not more than 15. We have kept it confidential and not made it available to the employees. We are planning to increase usage of Domo. We had a lot of negotiations with the team that was helpful regarding the sharing of a particular dashboard with other people. We have a one-user subscription and we want to share this with another one so that they can at least have a look at the performance in the organization. We are planning to share Domo with the employees. We have between 300 and 500 employees. Our target is that by the next financial year we will deploy this product throughout the organization.
One thing from my experience that we could have improved was that we had a limited number of technical people on it. You definitely need to be savvy with a lot of heavy SQL as well as API integrations. if you're trying to utilize it the most, the best thing to do is utilize their development platform. They have a developers page that really does wonders and takes it to the next step. If you're investing in it, then invest in being able to utilize that. They also have a webpage where they show a lot of examples with different data models, showing you how to utilize tools to the best of their capabilities. That is really great as well. The UI is definitely easy to pick up. If you do have a little bit of SQL experience, it's easier to use, rather than trying your own merge capability. It has its own user interface where you can do what you would initially do with queries or Redshift. That part is pretty good. But I prefer to use Domo's SQL and Redshift capabilities that require a little bit of coding, compared to what it has in its user interface, which allows similar processes. That being said, everything else has been really easy and very self-explanatory. They do have good documentation and they have user groups and discussion boards that provide a lot of answers to your questions. I definitely see use of the solution growing. There's so much more that it can be used for. There's a lot of predictive analysis that it can go into, and a lot of connectors that it can work with that allow you to use more and more functionalities and help with that whole predictive analysis aspect. In my previous organization, when I was there, they were growing the team to focus on what they could do with Domo. Overall, Domo really transformed how we worked with data. Things that would normally take three or four weeks could be set up to take a day or two, if not less. The fact that it was able to take a whole workload off and provide a lot of analysis and even further insight, in that shorter amount of time, was great.
Domo is a good tool, and you won't regret it if you chose it for your company, since it is a very useful tool if you want to check your data constantly and historically. You can compare and create graphics to compare the past with the present and estimate to see how your company is performing. Right now, the data is the most important thing in the world. Domo always tries to keep your data protected and available to you and your clients. This is something which good with Domo. As our company increases in size, our usage of Domo will increase. We use Datadog in conjunction with Domo, but they are two separate tools: Datadog is used for checking issues in the databases and Domo is used for uploading data from the databases. E.g., Datadog will inform you what is going on every second in the databases. It provides information if something is wrong or if one of the processes hasn't finished.
Implementing Domo depends on the project, how much time it will take to build the dashboards, how many KPIs you are looking at, and how much of your data will come into the system. It also matters how many data sources there are. If you have ten to 15 sources every time it is a lot of work because you need to join all those tables and combine them into one to build the dashboards on top of it. There is a difference between working with Domo and working on top of Domo. The major difference is that if you are working with Domo, you would rather use ETL and work with connectors; build the database and then dashboards for internal systems, sales, HR, marketing, and the website. That is working with Domo. But working outside of Domo, you just the APIs to push the data or the dashboard data, and you work on it on top of it. In our organization, I am the one who works with Domo the most. Our organization is pretty small. We are a startup still. For startups, there is no discount. There is a trial version but that is only for 30 days. If you want to use a basic system, go with AWS QuickSight because it is available with pay-as-you-go and it is way less, in comparison, because it is new in the market. I would rate Domo at six out of ten. I'm not in love with Domo. I have some issues with it. In my opinion, it is not that secure. I feel it is exposed a little. I also feel the ETL is a little outdated. They're not up to the mark on updating and don't have support for multiple languages. For example, they only support for Java right now. They don't even support Python or .NET.
If you implement Domo, go full-on with Domo and let go of all the legacy stuff. The big mistake is that you implement Domo and then you have something else as well. If you're thinking of consolidating analytics, go full-on because Domo can solve everything when it comes to data-handling, analytics, business intelligence, and reporting, etc. My advice would be: Have the courage to let go of all the old stuff. I'm a big fan in many ways. I'm not a techie in that sense, I'm more a CEO. But I'm a big ambassador of Domo. When you compare storage, for example, you have Dell EMC and then you have all the others. In business intelligence, you have Domo and then you have the others. That's how I see it. If the company I now work for, a new startup, ever grows to the size we need it to be, then I would be an ambassador for Domo again. Or if I was running a company, I would look at implementing Domo pretty quickly to get a really crisp understanding of how the business makes money, and what we can do to make more. Every organization is different, so you would probably use it differently depending on what you do. My old startup was a very sales-heavy business. It was a lot about sales and customer data and the like. In another organization, you might use different kinds of analytics and business intelligence. How you use it really depends on what you do. I would give it a ten out of ten. If you've actually lived the "Domo life," it's hard to get along with anything else after that. It is that good.
Don't complicate it. At first we thought it was going to be a lot more complicated. It just wasn't. Knowing that, next time, would help me a lot, instead of trying to plan so much for every detail. It was a lot easier than I expected and we spent a lot of time testing stuff and figuring out if the tool was updating. If we had trusted what they were saying, we would have finished a lot faster. If you don't have a lot of data changing, if your structures are not changing - some companies keep changing the way they structure their data and that will take a lot of time - maintenance isn't that bad. I spend about ten hours a week on maintenance of the solution, and we are running a really big implementation. It's mostly answering user questions. There haven't really been any problems. I am able to work on that and on other projects at the same time. I am able to maintain it with very minimal work. Overall, I'd give it an eight out ten. From easy usability to documentation to pricing, it's pretty much all there.