January 24, 2019
OpenX Announces First of Its Kind Five Year Collaboration with Google Cloud That Will Form The Foundation of New Product and Technology Strategy
Global Integration Will Deliver Greater Publisher Monetization and Improved Advertiser ROAS Through Superior Speed, Scalability and Reach Across OpenX Exchange
January 24, 2019, Los Angeles, CA – OpenX today announced a first of its kind collaboration that will bring the entire OpenX exchange into the cloud with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Through this deployment, OpenX will become the first ever major exchange to move all on-premises workloads fully into the cloud and become truly serverless. Work on integrating the five year technology collaboration began in 2018 with the companies expecting to complete the full transition to the cloud by the end of Q2, 2019.
This collaboration represents an evolutionary leap forward in how advertising exchanges operate today. Every other scaled exchange utilizes physical server locations around the world to power their businesses. These legacy systems hinder scalability as they must be close to the markets they power, hamper speed and inhibit rapid innovation due to the incredible maintenance costs and capital expenditures that must be diverted to sustain their lifecycle. By joining DBM in utilizing GCP to power its global exchange, OpenX will deliver faster innovations into the market and far greater efficiency for both buyers and sellers. Specific benefits include:
- Speed: The move into GCP will increase the speed that bids come into the OpenX exchange allowing publishers to see greater demand for their audiences before an auction closes driving increased revenue potential.
- Scalability: Powered by GCP, the OpenX exchange will be infinitely scalable, allowing the company to support publishers as they experience traffic spikes without sacrificing monetization opportunities or latency.
- Global Reach: OpenX’s complete cloud-based exchange will eliminate the dependency for on premises servers utilized by nearly every programmatic exchange today, allowing the company to enter new global markets almost instantaneously and scale specific locations based on their unique demands.
- Future-proofing: Google Cloud runs on the latest generation of computing power and technology. While on premise servers get outdated quickly, OpenX will leverage the latest technology through GCP.
- People Based Marketing: As OpenX focuses its product innovations and evolves its exchange to bring people-based marketing to the open web for the first time, the collaboration with GCP allows the company to build on its significant existing data asset, and eliminate any barriers or caps on the number of data points or unique identities utilized.
“Marketing has evolved significantly over recent years, and the old way of operating is no longer sustainable,” said Tim Cadogan, CEO of OpenX. “As we look at the programmatic market today, we see a sector that has experienced massive growth and adoption, but at the same time has stalled in its ability to deliver real innovation for marketers and publishers. We believe it is time to take a completely fresh look at the market and place a major bet on building the infrastructure necessary to drive the next wave of innovation. This investment and our work with Google will provide OpenX the flexibility to surge into new markets, adapt our business and billing models, expand our product suite to address the opportunity of people based marketing and provide our partners the exceptional quality and support they have come to expect.”
“Both OpenX and Google Cloud are dedicated to helping customers achieve their goals with cutting-edge technology,” says Chris Klayko, Managing Director, Americas, Google Cloud. “This collaboration will allow for continued innovation leveraging both OpenX’s Exchange Platform and Google Cloud’s commitment to performance, collaboration, and big data optimization at scale.”
Prior to 2019, almost one quarter of the OpenX tech workforce was dedicated to maintaining legacy infrastructure. The transition to Google Cloud Platform will free resources to focus on new growth areas for the company, such as people based marketing, video and CTV. These fast growth areas have seen strong early results, with video now making up more than 1 in 10 dollars on the OpenX exchange.