Microsoft announced that it is planning to buy Rapt Inc., an advertising yield management solution for digital media publishers. Microsoft is planning to integrate Rapt and its technology and information and advisory services offerings, to Atlas Publisher Suite of its Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group. This will allow Microsoft to provide its customers with integrated asset and inventory management, forecasting, yield and sales management and ad delivery operations.
Brian McAndrew, senior vice president of the Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group a said that Rapt’s technology will help online publishers with the challenges they face due to complex array of needs.
“With this acquisition, we are uniquely positioned to help publishers succeed on all fronts. Our end-to-end solution will include workflow tools, ad package and delivery, turnkey distribution, content partnerships, and yield management and optimization,” said McAndrew.
Merging Rapt with Microsoft’s Atlas Publisher Suite will result to an integrated publisher sales workflow solution. This solution will enhance the existing industry offerings for publishers’ sales team. If used together with Rapt’s existing pricing analytics, inventory management and business intelligence products on top of Atlas’ ad serving platform.
Tom Chavez, Rapt founder, president and CEO said that he couldn’t resist the opportunity to work with Microsoft.
“We’re confident that, with Microsoft, we can continually improve publisher results and aggressively grow our combined client base that already includes over half of the top 25 U.S. publishers.”
I don’t know about you, but I could see a similarity between this Microsoft announcement and Google’s Ad Manager Service. It may be not as obvious as it may seem, but I seem to have a hunch that is telling me that this is somehow a counter-attack against Google’s recently released Ad Manager Service.
