SAP Investing in Online Ads, Cloud & Mobility
German business software maker SAP had two significant announcements today, starting with an investment in OpenX. SAP’s venture arm is leading a $20 million funding round in the online exchange and server service. New investors AOL Ventures, Mitsui Global Investment and Presidio Ventures also participated in the series D round, in addition to existing investors Accel Partners, Index Ventures and DAG Ventures.
“The series D round brings total investment in OpenX to $50 million, as investors bet the software-as-a-service platform will win a big chunk of a still relatively undeveloped online ad market.”
The reason behind all this investor interest is that OpenX is a challenger to Google’s DoubleClick offering, which is currently prominent in the ad management and serving market. Further, the real-time ad trading site is also expanding rapidly, and has plans to reach Chinese and South Korean markets in 12 months. OpenX already manage to sign up some of DoubleClick’s customers, including mobile carrier Orange.
SAP has promised its investors it will more than double its revenue in 2015 thanks to a new cloud, mobile and business analytics-focused global strategy. Today, SAP Australia and New Zealand created two new roles by appointing Doug Gibson as director of high performance analytics, and Andrew Fox as head of mobility and Cloud solutions. Both execs have previously served in other positions at SAP, and will represent a major part of SAP’s push to grow its local customer base.
Partnerships represent a major part of SAP’s growth plan, and IT consultancy firm Capgemin is the latest one to join the list. Shortly after an announcement at the SAP Saphire conference that 3rd party providers will be able to start offering various services to SAP customers, Capgemin announced Rapid Cloud Workshop. The offers lets customers test drive their applications before launching them on AWS.
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