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Privately held advert software firm OpenX has announced a five-year agreement totalling more than US$110 million with Google Cloud, using the vendor’s cloud computing services in what the companies described as a first for the online ads industry.
OpenX said it has begun transferring data to Google servers from its own and that it would become the first major online ad exchange to move fully to the cloud.
The company said it signed the deal in the fourth quarter after evaluating cloud providers including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, both of which are far ahead of Google Cloud in market share.
Its financial commitment to Google Cloud represents a minimum and the tab will grow as the firm uses more artificial intelligence services, OpenX CTO Paul Ryan said in an interview.
Among the few other companies that disclose cloud contracts, chat app developer Snap has said it must spend at least US$400 million annually on Google Cloud for five years.
Ad exchanges use automated software to match millions of ad requests each second from online publishers with real-time bids from advertisers.
(Reporting by Paresh Dave; Editing by James Dalgleish)
