Utah entrepeneur Josh James started Cloud-based analytics firm Omniture when he was 23, took it public in 2006 at the age of 33 and sold it to Adobe for a cool $1.8 billion in 2009. So the question now is: what do you do for an encore?
The answer to that is slowly emerging with the latest development being the sourcing of $10 million of angel funding from a list of investors that reads as the good and great of the Cloud industry – AKA as Josh's contacts book. The list includes Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com; Paul Sagen, CEO of Akamai Technologies and Lars Dalgaard, CEO of SuccessFactors.
James commented:
OK, so he's got the big name backing, but what is his new venture going to do? Well, let's see what we know. It's called Shaco for the moment - that's a holding company – and it's all about business intelligence and delivering that holy grail of providing senior management with information as it happens, not after it happens. James explained:
Back in October last year, James bought an existing Utah-based company called Corda Technologies, which has developed dashboard software that solves part of the problem. But the exact nature of what James proposes to bring to market remains under wraps until later this year.
But he has some powerful people betting on him getting this right. WPP, the world's leading marketing communications services firm, is a strategic investor in this round. WPP Chief Executive Officer Sir Martin Sorrell said:
