OpenX Launches Breakthrough Ad Technology Platform

Major digital businesses globally – including Groupon in the U.S., Orange-France Telecom Group in Europe and Excite Japan – are adopting the revenue maximizing functionality of OpenX Enterprise

PASADENA, Calif., February 8, 2011 OpenX Technologies, Inc. (OpenX), the world’s leading independent provider of ad technology for web publishers, today announced the launch of a new, breakthrough version of OpenX Enterprise. The new platform, the company’s Software as a Service ad serving product for large publishers, combines the totally updated capabilities of a true premium ad server with new, advanced technology that enables publishers to maximize yield across all their ad revenue channels in real-time. The company also announced that several major digital businesses around the world are adopting OpenX Enterprise. These customers include Groupon in the United States, Orange-France Telecom Group in Europe and Excite Japan in Japan. The platform becomes available to all publishers today.

OpenX Enterprise’s innovative technology now empowers leading publishers to more efficiently and effectively maximize revenue in the increasingly sophisticated ad landscape. Today many publishers find revenue management inefficient and complex because they have to utilize different tools to manage different demand channels. For example, some publishers today use their old ad server for exclusive and guaranteed campaigns and then use a separate and unintegrated service to attempt to optimize non-guaranteed and real-time bidded demand.

In contrast, OpenX’s new platform maximizes publisher revenue by optimizing all ad revenue channels in one place. This includes inventory sold through a direct sales force as well as inventory sold indirectly through the rapidly increasing number of demand sources such as ad networks and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs). Another vital component of the OpenX Enterprise platform is an integrated and comprehensive data collection and targeting system that allows publishers to use both proprietary and third-party data to enable audience-based media buying across their inventory.

“We’re extremely excited to launch the brand new version of OpenX Enterprise because it really attacks some of the most fundamental challenges facing publishers today,” said Tim Cadogan, chief executive officer, OpenX. “Specifically, we think it’s vital for all of a publisher’s ad revenue streams to compete in a way the publisher can understand and control in a consistent way. OpenX Enterprise now allows a publisher to manage and optimize exclusive, guaranteed, non-guaranteed and real-time revenue sources all in one unified platform. Furthermore, we have created powerful audience segmentation tools combined with seamless third-party integration capabilities so that all of a publisher’s data – first- and third-party – resides right within the ad server. We think this is essential for publishers to level the playing field with sophisticated buyers in order to extract full and fair economic value from their inventory. Finally, we have incorporated a very robust set of APIs to make OpenX Enterprise the most flexible and extensible platform in the market. We believe this unique combination of capabilities makes OpenX Enterprise a platform many publishers can truly build their businesses on for the long-term.”

“For a business growing as rapidly as Groupon, OpenX Enterprise has already been a great solution,” said Rob Solomon, president and chief operating officer, Groupon. “OpenX’s revenue serving vision is both extremely innovative and very logical and the flexibility of the technology has worked extremely well for our business. It’s an intuitive and easily scalable product that has made our team more efficient. We’re very excited to keep building our ad business on top of the OpenX ad platform.”

“OpenX Enterprise provides important new features that solve the complex problems facing publishers today,” said Toshio Kawauchi, director of media sales, Excite Japan. “We believe the platform’s unique technology is essential to the next generation of ad serving.”

“Serving targeted, relevant advertising to the visitors of Orange Advertising Networks™ is foundational to how we run our digital business and we’re excited to have launched the platform initially in our Spanish market,” said Luc Tran Thang, vice president, Orange Advertising. “OpenX Enterprise is both more revenue intelligent and business oriented.”

OpenX Enterprise features a number of key and unique benefits:

1. Significantly increases revenue across all demand channels:

a. Manage all ad revenue channels – exclusive, guaranteed, non-guaranteed, real-time bidding – through one unified ad revenue platform

b. Unified real-time ad decisions maximize value of every ad impression

c. Retain complete sales channel control to protect premium exclusive and guaranteed revenue streams

2. Bundled tier-one DSP and agency trading desk buyers: Real-Time Bidding (RTB) buyers pre-integrated within the ad server:

a. Unique monetization functionality built directly into the ad server allows publishers to take full advantage of RTB demand sources

b. Industry’s leading RTB buyers all enabled directly within the ad server so publishers have seamless, controllable access to the rapidly growing universe of RTB revenue from DSPs and agency trading desks

c. Publisher control over economics (reserve pricing), buyer access (e.g. buyer white and black lists) and quality

3. Faster, more effective tools for ad operations:

a. Fundamentally redesigned ad operations workflow removes layers of translation and spreadsheets that traditional ad servers require

b. Simplifies trafficking by eliminating unnecessary repetition and reduces human errors

c. New features like ad products enable ad operations teams to be less reactive and task driven and become more proactive about driving ad revenue

4. Advanced data capabilities:

a. Publishers actually own their own data with OpenX Enterprise

b. Enables publishers to develop audience segments utilizing their proprietary user activity data with every ad impression

c. Enables publishers to blend proprietary data with third-party data to create differentiated hybrid segments

d. All audience data is seamlessly actionable for ad targeting, forecasting and reporting because it is stored natively within the ad server

5. Massively flexible:

a. Complete API framework and object-based design throughout the platform makes it simple to integrate with other components of the publisher’s enterprise stack (e.g. financial, business intelligence and CRM systems)

b. Easy access to impression-level data allows publishers to understand and control their business

c. Flexible architecture powers advertising innovation

About OpenX

OpenX is the world’s leading independent provider of digital advertising technology that enables businesses to manage and maximize their ad revenue. OpenX products, including OpenX Enterprise and OpenX Market, provide a comprehensive revenue generation platform by combining ad serving with a unique ad exchange. OpenX ad serving products are used by more than 200,000 websites in more than 100 countries and serve more than 350 billion ads monthly. OpenX Market reaches more than 400 million monthly unique users worldwide.

OpenX Technologies, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of OpenX Limited, is based in Los Angeles and is backed by leading investors including Accel Partners, Index Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. For more information, please visit:www.openx.org.

OpenX is a trademark of OpenX Limited.

OpenX Media Contact:

Al Duncan
1.626.466.1142
media@openx.org