How OpenX is Collaborating with Google to Realize its New Product and Technology Strategy

Earlier this week, Openx and Google 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 workloads fully into the public cloud.

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 inhibit rapid innovation due to the incredible maintenance costs and capital expenditures that must be diverted to sustain their lifecycle. Additionally, servers can become outdated quickly, and the need to be close to the markets they power can significantly prolong the process of global expansion.

In utilizing GCP to power our global exchange, OpenX will be running on the same technology as Google themselves, and it will allow us to 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 for all practical purposes 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 While on premise servers get outdated quickly, OpenX will leverage the latest technology through GCP.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.

Work on integrating the five year technology collaboration began in 2018 and we expect to complete the full transition to the cloud by the end of Q2, 2019.  The partnership represents a significant step forward for not just OpenX, but digital advertising as an industry, and we look forward to sharing more updates as work on the integration is completed.