SALT LAKE CITY — Offering up his huge smile and infectiously warm personality, Earvin “Magic” Johnson spoke to nearly 2,000 people in attendance at the Domopalooza Conference Tuesday at Grand America Hotel.
Johnson, an enormously successful businessman — investing in movie theaters, Starbucks, Burger King and T.G.I. Friday’s restaurants and now the Los Angeles Dodgers, just to name a few businesses — following his Hall of Fame NBA career, took the stage as a keynote speaker and guest of Josh James, founder and CEO of Domo, the Software as a Service data consolidating business platform.
“If you over-deliver to your customers you are going to get the retention you’re looking for,” Johnson said. “But you have to over deliver.”
Johnson’s quote fit the message James hoped to show his Domo client base in attendance Tuesday at Domopalooza, where James unveiled the next phase of upgrades to his already burgeoning company.
According to James, Domo has created and offers the world’s first business cloud. The company also revealed the launch of the Domo Appstore, with more than 1,000 apps, new social and mobile capabilities to Domo customers, and a “free offering to welcome every company and every employee into the Business Cloud.”
The announcement came on the second day of Domopalooza, which continues Wednesday.
“When I was running my last company, I always thought someone should make it possible to run your entire business in the cloud, and since Day One at Domo, we've been working toward that,” James said. “With the Business Cloud, customers quickly get the big picture of what's going on in their business by leveraging the preferred cloud and on-premise software they use every day in finance, sales, marketing and operations.
“The multi-cloud infrastructure we’ve developed over the past five years is now an open ecosystem, giving our partners even broader visibility and adoption opportunities through our platform and Appstore,” James said, both to the attendees and in a company press release. “What’s more, today anyone can sign up on their own and start experiencing for free how the Business Cloud changes the way business is managed.”
According to the release, “The Business Cloud gives (businesses) all the data, all the people and all the insights needed to run (an) entire business and make faster, better decisions to improve business performance. Through an ecosystem of business management apps, the Business Cloud can be personalized by any employee in any company. These new apps are a mix of free and premium pre-packaged solutions that are easy to discover and use, enabling decision makers to find answers to business questions specific to their role or industry.
“The Business Cloud is also available for free to any user; users pay to store more data or access more advanced enterprise functionality such as administrative controls.”
The Domopalooza festivities Tuesday included marching bands, haka drummers, balloons and streamers from the ceiling, and high-tech visuals. James also invited several Domo employees to help reveal some of the contents within the new products, had a short Q&A with Eric Varvel of Credit Suisse, a Domo product user, and then let Johnson do his thing on stage.
Johnson, sharing his enormous smile, took pictures with attendees and told stories about his days on the court against Larry Bird and Michael Jordan. He also shared how he found success in the business world by leveraging available data.
"Using our data analytics (at L.A. Dodgers' games) things like how many ice creams we sell. We can tell everything we sell each and every night," Johnson said. "We can also use it on our players, so we can understand how well they perform in the first inning, or the ninth inning. That becomes very important to winning ..."
On the first day of the conference Monday, attendees broke into several boot-camp sessions to learn more about how to effectively use Domo.
Each session — there were six, three-hour boot-camp sessions in the morning, and the same six sessions in the afternoon — had somewhere between 15-30 participants at a computer learning from experienced Domo instructors.
The sessions were titled: Domo Bootcamp, Connect and Prepare 101, Data Visualization, Power Users: Connect and Prepare 201, Beast Mode, and Major Domo: Business Governance.
Brett Haymond, a senior manager in Domo’s consulting organization, was an instructor for the Major Domo class. He said, “The sessions went extremely well. We had a broad cross-section of customers represented. We polled the group at the beginning of each session and found we had one-third of customers who were new to Domo (three months or less), one-third had been on Domo for three-12 months, and one-third who had been on Domo for over a year. Regardless of their tenure with the platform, we found everyone to be well-versed and able to navigate it nimbly.
“The system was well-received, and many in the room expressed the excitement of having a new perspective on how to drive strategy and change via data with their business,” Haymond continued.
The Domopalooza Conference will continue Wednesday with speeches from David Bang of DHL; Stanley McChrystal, a four-star general who ran special ops forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; Kacy Harding, the head of analytics for Connected Digital Propositions at Phillips; Julie Yerks, commercial business insights and project management leader at GE Digital; and Steve Eisman, credited as the inspiration for the character Mark Baum, Steve Carrell’s role, in the Academy Award nominated film “The Big Short.”
Rap artists T.I. and Flo-Rida entertained the crowd Tuesday evening. Recording stars Nelly and Walk the Moon are scheduled to perform Wednesday.
According to a release from Julie Kehoe, vice president of communications for Domo, “an estimated 1,500 or more business professionals joined the 2016 event. Eighty percent of those attendees are at the management level or higher across organizations ranging from mid-sized corporations to worldwide enterprises.”
Domo customers include companies that operate across the globe such as GE, MasterCard and SABMiller. There will also be a number of local Utah customers in attendance — such as Landesk, Bohme and Rhodes, to name a few, Kehoe added in her release.
Brady Bingham is a reporter with more than 25 years of journalism experience. Find Brady Bingham on Facebook at www.facebook.com/brady.bingham.92?ref=name or Twitter @BradyBingham.