Openads rebrands as OpenX; Jon Miller joins board as Chairman

Open Source Ad-Server company Openads has been in the news recently for many good things – it got a $15.5 million Series B fund. Earlier, it got a $5 million in Series A capital fund, led by Index Ventures, with participation from First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

Openads also rebranded itself yet again as OpenX. It may be noted that OpenAds was re-branded from its earlier incarnation – PHPAdsNew. OpenX is perhaps one of the most popular Ad-Server used by many Publishers. They’ve an estimated 30,000 Publishers using the software on over 100,000 sites spreading across 150 odd countries, in more than 20 languages. Even Federated Media is built on top of OpenX and TechCrunch uses OpenX to serve ads on its site.

The OpenX Blog has a consolidated FAQ about the changes in its brand;

When a software project is a grass roots effort, the only consideration that is made regarding the name is whether it is available in Sourceforge. There are no other considerations taken into account. We needed to create a name for our company that has not just one dimension (it is an appropriate name for an open source ad server), but many dimensions (e.g. will extend to other products as well). Changing a name is a very difficult decision, and we did not take this task lightly. We spent months choosing a name. Mel and I finally came to a decision with OpenX, and we stand behind it. I can promise you that this is the last time.

However, other than the change in its name, OpenX promises that there will be no change in the way the Ad-Server gets installed or upgraded. If you do not customize the Ad-Server, the new logo will appear in the upper left corner of the product. OpenX says they’re evolving the look and feel of the Ad-Server to be much cleaner than before.

Jon Miller joins OpenX board

The latest news with OpenX is that of Jon Miller, the former CEO of AOL, joining them as Chairman. Jonathan Miller left AOL and has since been quite active in the Startup realm as an investor and board member. He is a partner in the Velocity Interactive Group with former Fox Interactive Media chief Ross Levinsohn.

OpenX is Open-Source under a GPL license, and so free to use. OpenX will make money by layering services on top of the core software, something MySQL, Wordpress, Zimbra and others have done successfully.

OpenX Hosted Ad-Server

OpenX also started a hosted solution Ad-Server which will make OpenX easier to use and manage – both for existing OpenX users and new publishers intersted in taking control of their online ad inventory. You can request for a registration of their new Hosted Solution.