A new software as a service company Domo is formally launching tonight at a party in Salt Lake City. I have no idea how opulent or bare-bones this party will be, but theoretically the company would have plenty to spend on drinks, T-shirts and canapes. It just raised a massive $33 million series A from Benchmark Capital. Actually, counting the angel investments that were closed earlier but rolled into the same round, the company has raised $43 million.

But before you cry “COLOR!” it’s worth noting Domo has a few unique things going for it. It is founded by Josh James, the founder and 10-year CEO of Omniture, one of the very few SaaS companies out of thousands funded in the late 1990s/early 2000s that actually managed to build a $1 billion-plus company. (He’s to the left enjoying his Nasdaq moment.)

He’s not a household name, because he’s not in the consumer space. But Benchmark partner Matt Cohler — who’s worked with some of the best entrepreneurs as an early executive at Facebook and LinkedIn– was salivating at the thought of backing the next Josh James company. In fact, after Omniture went public and subsequently sold to Adobe for $1.8 billion, Cohler told James, “I know you are not finished and you are going to do this again. When you do please give me a call.” When James called, Cohler dropped everything and flew to Utah. “I don’t say this about many people, but he is one of the best entrepreneurs in the world,” Cohler said.

Bromances aside, Domo is also building a product for a very defined, large market space: Business intelligence is a $10 billion industry today and expected to become a $14 billion industry by 2014, according to Gartner. And although companies spend loads of money on the basic problem of trying to figure out what is going on with their business at a glance, nearly everyone is unhappy with current market solutions. In other words, it’s a classic enterprise software market opportunity.

There’s a good and a bad to that. The good is people are hungry for something that works. The bad is that after decades of promises– everything from Tom Siebel saying his software could “see around corners” just before his own business tanked to the early SaaS obsession with dashboards– companies just don’t believe vendor promises anymore.

In truth, this is one of those hard problems that there’s probably no single, silver-bullet solution to. Certainly the early waves of enterprise and SaaS systems have made things better, even if they aren’t great. But Cohler points out that the problem itself and the expectations for what software should be able to do also keep changing dramatically.

I’m about as sick of people saying “consumerization of enterprise” as I am of “gamification,” but in truth, people are considerably more Web savvy today and they have higher expectations of how any software they interact with should function. “If you add it up Facebook and Twitter’s active users are almost $1 billion people,” Cohler says. “150 million people use Amazon in the US alone.” Humanity en masse is just more tech savvy. On top of that SaaS has continued to gain acceptance within large companies, and of course data is just exploding at a rate that makes the business intelligence problem exponentially bigger and the pain exponentially worse. Even if past solutions worked back then, they’re increasingly getting obsolete.

Domo isn’t talking much about its product yet aside from these broad brushstrokes, but the company is pretty far along. Part of this series A went to purchasing a company called Corda that has helped accelerate some of the back-end development, and there are already several customers in beta.

Benchmark is the only VC firm that invested, although some other VCs invested as individual angels, including powerhouse enterprise software guru Ben Horowitz. (I asked Cohler if Benchmark muscled Andreessen Horowitz out of the deal and got a “no comment.”)

Facebook is ramping up advertising by deepening its ties to other online advertising companies, particularly the ones which offer tools to manage and monitor ad campaigns. Today, it revealed its first set of partners to incorporate the Facebook Ads API into their own products. In addition to Clickable (which we discovered earlier), the other partners are Alchemy, Glow, Kenshoo, Marin Software, Omniture, and TBG.

All of them variously help to manage and optimize ad campaigns across the Web. Advertisers who already use these tools, can now create and manage their Facebook ads alongside their other types of ads. All of this is done via the Facebook Ad API.

The more that Facebook can get its ad system to work with the existing ad technology out there, the easier it will be for advertisers to start trying out campaigns on Facebook. Opening up its Ads APIs, though, also puts extra pressure on Facebook to prove that its ads can perform just as well or better than ads elsewhere on the Web. Advertisers who run their ads through these management and analytics tools can see the relative performance of each type of ad and adjust their budgets accordingly.

Omniture, acquired by Adobe for $1.8 billion last year, has expanded its partnership with Facebook. Together, the companies aim to provide marketers with solutions to optimize the enormously popular social network as an effective online marketing channel.

Initially, Omniture and Facebook will focus on the ability to automate Facebook media buying and access analytics that measure customer engagement on the social networking service, although the two companies indicated that the partnership will expand even more in the future.

The closer tie builds on the Facebook (and FB apps) analytics capabilities Omniture announced in May 2009.

With the new solution, Omniture customers can now utilize the company’s new SearchCenter Plus product, essentially an enhancement of its search engine marketing management application with new functionality for purchasing Facebook Ads. Omniture customers will thus be able to compare Facebook ad campaign metrics alongside other media channels and increase their ad spend on the social network using tools they’re already familiar with.

In addition, Omniture customers can now generate reports specifically designed to understand ad effectiveness for things like Facebook Pages and applications.

Just yesterday, Eric Eldon from InsideFacebook posted a great, detailed article estimating Facebook’s current and future revenue run rate, projecting that the company could be on track to surpass $1.1 billion in 2010 (and could already have topped $700 million last year).

Partnerships like the one with Omniture are a great way for Facebook to appease marketers who have to date been hesitant to make a substantial investment in marketing on the social network as long as they have to learn new ways of setting up campaigns and can’t effectively track the success of those initiatives.

Adobe Systems has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Omniture for the former to acquire the latter in a transaction valued at approximately $1.8 billion on a fully diluted equity-value basis. Under the terms of the agreement, Adobe will commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding common stock of Omniture for $21.50 per share in cash. The proposed offer represents a premium of 45% over Omniture’s average closing price for the last 30 trading days through yesterday’s close.

The completion of the transaction, pending regulatory approval, is expected to close in Q4 of Adobe’s fiscal year. The company believes the acquisition will be accretive to its non-GAAP earnings in fiscal year 2010.

Omniture will become a new business unit within Adobe. Omniture’s CEO, Josh James, will be joining Adobe Systems as the unit’s Senior VP, reporting directly to Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen.

At the same time, Adobe reported that third-quarter earnings fell to 35 cents per share from 50 cents per share a year ago. Adobe shares fell 3.6 percent in after-hours trading to $34.34. Omniture shares were halted after the close.

From the official statement:

By combining Adobe’s content creation tools and ubiquitous clients with Omniture’s Web analytics, measurement and optimization technologies, Adobe will be well positioned to deliver solutions that can transform the future of engaging experiences and e-commerce across all digital content, platforms and devices.

The combination of the two companies will increase the value Adobe delivers to customers. For designers, developers and online marketers, an integrated workflow—with optimization capabilities embedded in the creation tools—will streamline the creation and delivery of relevant content and applications. This optimization will enable advertisers and advertising agencies, publishers, and e-tailers to realize greater ROI from their digital media investments and improve their end users’ experiences.

Omniture was founded in 1996 and currently counts approx. 1,200 employees worldwide. It’s the largest worldwide provider of Web analytics, with a product portfolio of 12 products serving over 5,000 customers across the globe. It reported revenues in fiscal year 2008 of about $300 million.

The online advertising business is in for a rough patch, especially for display advertising. The signs are everywhere. Yahoo, the biggest publisher of display ads on the Web, reported a 2 percent decline in display ad revenues in the fourth quarter, and the New York Times is seeing even steeper declines.

There is just way too much advertising inventory out there, and Websites are actually trying to show less ads per page to reduce ad clutter and keep advertising rates from cratering. The chart above from comScore’s 2008 Digital Year in Review shows that the number of display ads served in the U.S. is actually slightly down from a year ago. Even so, comScore estimates that 4.5 trillion ads were served to U.S. consumers last year. That comes to 2,000 ads per month per person.

And how many of those ads even register? The more ads that get thrown at us, the more we learn to ignore them.

As a consequence of the declining display ad revenues and the over-saturation of ads, there is simply no need for the 300-plus ad networks out there. And what we are seeing now is the stronger ad networks are picking up funding to shore up their positions and the weaker ones are getting bought. Just last night, for instance, Glam Media bought AdaptiveAds. This morning SocialMedia raised $6 million rather than the initial $20 million it was looking for and mobile ad network AdMob raised $12.5 million.

AdMob described its funding round as a “series C extension” of the $15.7 million it raised from Sequoia just last October. CEO Omar Hamoui confirmed to me that today’s funding was at the same valuation as the last one. Any funding in this environment is an accomplishment, but it does support my shoring up thesis. And AdMob is 100% focused on ads that appear on mobile phones, especially the new crop of Web-capable devices. This is still a high-growth area (and is not represented in the chart above), but it makes you wonder if those mobile ad rates are also feeling the pressure. Update: They are.

The new offer, which is basically an extension of its existing SiteCatalyst solution, is called App Measurement for iPhone and will be generally available as from January 2009. To our knowledge this is the first analytics program specifically designed for native iPhone applications, but it’s safe to say other providers will soon follow suit with similar offerings.

Update: that’s why we love commenters. Venture-backed Pinch Media also offers an analytics suite for iPhone developers.

Update 2: similar service providers include Medialets, Mobilytics, AppLoop and Mobclix.

In related news, Tel Aviv-based Kenshoo is taking its Search Engine Marketing campaign management solution mobile, enabling users to consult campaign statistics and reports from their iPhone browser. More information about their solution is available here, and a video demo can be viewed here.

Omniture, which provides tools for marketers to track their online campaigns, is announcing a set of product upgrades today. New versions of its flagship product SiteCatalyst and its search advertising product SearchCenter will be released.

In addition to improved user interfaces (apparently five years of usability testing went into the products’ redesigns), the products in Omniture’s suite of SaaS applications are now connected tightly by a unified wrapper. Basically this means that marketers can move more easily between the products to manage various aspects of their campaigns. The unification is not only on the front end; all the programs now run off the same database as well.

As far as functionality is concerned, the most important addition to SiteCatalyst is support for the tracking of video usage across the web. If you are a marketer who uses videos to spread your message, you can now use Omniture to track metrics like how long people are watching your videos, whether they tend to skip forward in them, the rate at which they drop off, and which particular features in the video players they use.

The same technology that can be used to track video usage can also be applied to Flash and Flex-based applications. Omniture representatives say that only a 2 byte SWF file added to a Flash application is needed to prepare that app for tracking. As with video, marketers can see which application features are being used most.

Omniture is an online marketing analytics company. Genesis is a measurement, performance, and integration tool. Integration being the key buzzword of the event. In this case, integration refers to the ability to understand how various online campaigns perform both together and separate, and making marketing purchases accordingly.

Are marketers not doing that? Forrester analyst Char VanBoskirk presented data showing that they don’t. Instead, she said that most marketers subscribe to the more-is-more theory.

“Users know how to filter out messages with spam filters and pop-up blockers. So how are most marketers responding to this challenge? They just send more messages,” VanBoskirk said. “Advertising on network TV has increased. Radio stations are airing more commercials per hour of programming than ever before. So in case you’re wondering, this is bad!”

VanBoskirk said that the smarter marketer will develop a data store, subscribe to a reporting and analysis tool, and then find a dashboard to manage activities. That’s what Genesis is.

Genesis allows users to develop about a billion “what if” scenarios based on various marketing campaigns. They can choose a campaign, and then drag and drop distribution tools such as DoubleClick for banner ads, or CheetahMail for email campaigns. All 30 Genesis partners have their product there for marketers to choose as a possibility. Once all distribution scenarios have been chosen, marketers can order up a channel summary that shows revenue by channel, top performing campaigns, etc. It’s a ton of information.

Omniture calls this a Plug and Play approach, which they say is the next generation in marketing. They call it the perfect example of Marketing 2.0.