Tony Bevilacqua

OpenAds have re-branded (Again) over to OpenX. Recently OpenX has received significant investment, and it seems that this has helped this latest move towards another rebranding of their organization.

OpenX has been through its fair share of identities, phpAds… phpAdsNew… Max Media… OpenAds… the list goes on. What’s in the future? OpenX will begin to offer a hosted service and continue quickly evolving their ad serving suite.

SpawnPoint and PHXX have been active users of phpAds, phpAdsNew, and OpenAds over the years, serving millions of ad impressions through this open-source software. I am quite excited to see the evolution of their software, and this “hosted service” that is on the way.

Word of advice to the OpenX team, add the ability to “Forecast” ad serving over periods of time; this is an essential tool for ad sales team looking for information and delivery expectations for clients. This missing feature causes quite a few issues with our group. This feature is offered by DoubleClick (DART).

In the past week, I have been reminded by the dire importance of not putting all your IT Assets and Infrastructure into a single basket. When IT supplies the front end to your business, your identity and your infrastructure for your business model to be even possible, it is important that keep this area of your business under control.

Information Technology is more that just keeping your computer up and running, so you can check your email and print documents. In many cases, IT Infrastructure dominates the entire model of a business - processing transactions, providing information and attracting new clients. It can’t be shoveled aside and only dealt with only when business stoppage occurs.

IT needs to be kept healthy, it needs love, it needs redundancy, it needs to be maintained. Although you may have your bases covered with data backups, disaster recovery, and redundancy… what about continuity in the case of a loss of resource? What happens when you lose critical IT staff? Is your business ready to manage and move forward?