Adomo raises round to unify messaging at big businesses

For years, companies like Cisco, and all the little piranha start-ups nibbling at Cisco, have sought to make communications simpler for companies and their employees.

Adomo, of Cupertino, Calif., is the latest Silicon Valley start-up attempting to give employees a way to bring together voice and email messages on a single networked “platform.” It comes at a time when there are more opportunities than ever to open up such platforms to integration with other social web services — which could make employees more productive. Whether or not Adomo exploits this or not, remains to be seen.

It has raised a new round of $15 million from Menlo Ventures and Storm Ventures.

Adomo lets companies integrate their existing phone systems with internet phone systems (VoIP) and other business communication software, such Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. You can choose to get your messages and email on your PC or mobile phone, or both. You can do things like receive emails with audio files of your phone messages, with subject lines that include the name and number of the caller. The company matches up callers with company and personal address books, so you can learn more about who’s calling and figure out who you need to call back, first.

Adomo clients — Fortune 5000 companies in finance, health care, manufacturing and other industries — have customized, complex amalgamations of communications software that their IT departments have pieced together over the years. So-called “unified messaging” has the potential to make these companies’ employees more efficient through streamlining their communication processes.Competitors like Cisco offer complete telephony hardware and software packages for hooking up internet-based phones within organizations. But this may require replacing existing telephony system. Adomo’s modular software can provide a similar service more cheaply and easily, chief executive Mathew Frazer tells us.

Interestingly, the company also says it will begin offering more communication software on top of the messaging system. The company didn’t give us any specifics but it’s worth noting that consumer-facing web services are beginning to merge with business software. For example, business software company Oracle has joined Google’s new OpenSocial initiative, a developer platform.

Here, a third party could build an application that runs inside of Oracle as well as other OpenSocial partners, such as business social network LinkedIn.

While OpenSocial is still in the early stages of development, an application that automatically shows an employee LinkedIn data within Oracle software could help the person to make connections with people they might not otherwise find.

Adomo has an interesting opportunity to tie big business communication together with these social web services. If employees could match their messages in Adomo with their contacts in related software provided by Oracle and LinkedIn, they might make useful connections even more efficiently.

Adomo says it will use the funding to expand product development, marketing and sales efforts.

This is the company’s second recapitalization, as VentureWire notes (subscription only), which means it has apparently struggled and had to revalue itself. It raised nearly $8 million between 1999 and 2002 from individual investors, strategic investor Hexagon and Bridge Venture Fund III, an angel fund.

Since its first recapitalization in 2002, it had previously raised $20 million from Menlo Ventures, Storm Ventures and private individuals.