OpenX is an ad serving platform. It is sold option as a hosted solution for can be purchased as an installed application. It allows for easy inventory management , geo-targeting of ads by country, and provides statistics for each ad placement.
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Xactly Incent
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Xactly Incent is a software solution that allows companies to design, automate and manage incentive compensation—from the simple to the complex—and align seller behavior with revenue goals. With Xactly Incent helps customers to reduce time spent on plan administration, realize higher quota attainment, eliminate payout errors and increase payout accuracy, drive better performance with commission visibility.
With its integrations, companies can combine compensation data with CRM, ERP, HCM and…
What are the best ways to integrate it with salesforce.com? What are the best ways to target our users with this tool? To segment the users? How can I integrate my ads with your adexchange-what sizes are you looking for in terms of banners, skyscrapers and so on. In this way I can plan my in house ad and those for the exchange to be the same size, to avoid duplication of work.
Xactly Incent is well suited for communicating commission information to the field. I love that they can just log on and see all the data they need to verify the commissions they receive. I also like the option to post messages and announcements within the application.
OpenX is a system that was designed to scale as is evident in some key design decisions found throughout the platform. The multi-server setup that was chosen at Mail.com allowed for a distributed server architecture which separated the front end web delivery nodes from the backend MySQL Database master which replicated data back to each front end delivery node mysql slave. This eased the ability to horizontally scale as needed due to the ingenious separation of the ad impressions data tables on the delivery nodes which were being collected locally on each ad impression and then processed periodically back to to the master database which replicated the aggregated statistics back to the delivery nodes. The ability to load balance across the front end web delivery nodes, add caching at many different layers, utilize a CDN for the static ad images, implement PHP accelerators, and hit memcached instead of the MySQL master made the OpenX platform a service that was very resilient to failures.
The ability to optimize the platform is also something that OpenX does very well. This is evident in many of the config key parameters available. In addition to OpenX specific tunable's, optimizations can be made at many different levels in which the system sits. These include hardware and operating system level optimizations, tcp and networking stack optimizations, web server/php-cgi configurations, and database (MySQL InnoDB) tunable's. There are many different optimization knobs that can be tuned to help scale the application for the best performance possible
The documentation was simple, to the point, and well written which led to an easy initial implementation and roll out of a multi-server setup. The installation and upgrade procedures were straight forward even for the complexities of the multi-server setup. I also found the OpenX team to be accessible and even got a chance to meet some of the team at their Up Close and Personal events at Cal Tech in Pasadena. Core developers were on hand to answer technical questions and also made themselves available to us via email and irq channels.
The open nature of the OpenX platform allows for flexibility in the choice of web serving platform to use (Apache, nginx, Lighttpd) and also the database management systems (MySQL, PostGreSQL)
Maintaining Hierarchies can become difficult throughout the fiscal year if you have a multi-layered commissions model. My team would benefit from a smoother mechanism to update/maintain hierarchies in the system.
Special characters are not supported in the tool and that can become a problem given we use the system globally.
Game changer if the system allowed more customization on the people object.
I no longer work at the company where I was using OpenX, but if I were then I'd certainly stay aboard. Frankly, there are a lot of sunk costs involved with building all of the infrastructure we had put in place, the system was working very well even if reporting was a hassle, and our team was trained on it. Also, I'm not aware of another product that does everything else we'd need it to.
Xactly Incent is a great tool for calculating commissions. The interface is user friendly and the system is set up in a way that allows for multiple setups for each commission plan. Over the last couple years since I have been on the commission team we have been able to optimize our plans to promote scalability. Our sales and accounting teams have become familiar with navigating the system which promotes transparency. From an audit perspective, Incent provides us with the reports and data we need to provide to our auditors.
I was given the system to use as part of setting up a whole new site from scratch in less than 2 months, with a large number of specialty hub pages to run ads on and lots of content I needed to run disease specific ads on. The system was easy for me to learn on the fly in a very compressed time frame. I would have loved more chance to really dig in under the hood to see all that it could do, but given how fast I had to work, I got everything up and running and looking great. And I did it ahead of my launch deadline too. My only reservation might be for people who are not as patient as I am in picking things up, or as hands on. Customer service was great if I needed them, and a quick start guide with the essentials would be ideal for those people.
The devil is in the detail. It's not intuitive to use, also not for Sales employees. You need to train them. For superusers like me you need a lot of training to administrate the system. It has a lot of functionalities and complexity like staging and upload orders, reset triggers, updating & creating rate tables. A lot of formulars are necessary to learn.
Xactly Incent is always available, they have planned monthly maintenance on Friday nights but are very proactive to communicate it. Monthly maintenance is useful as they address any bugs and also are constantly upgrading the user interface to make it easier to use.
Xactly Incent performs extremely well. I have not experienced it "slowing down" when usage is heavy. This is particularly true when it comes to the regular recalculation of credits and commissions. It is not uncommon for Xactly to be dealing with hundreds of thousands of orders/credits in a pay period, but the system handles it well. Xactly recently changed their calculation engine and the speed for regular refreshes increased significantly.
They went above and beyond without ever asking for additional money and we met our launch date and immediately started to meet and even surpass our business goals. Nothing was too much trouble, which really stood out compared to other companies I had and was at that time also working with. Customer service can really make or break any business; if i expect my staff to give good customer service, I expect to get it too, and Open X gave it.
They take the time to understand the system. They keep us updated on the status of our cases. Finally, their continued follow up ensuring the initial issue was resolved is very nice. They will not close the case out until they have confirmed that our issue has been completely resolved and fixed.
It was great, good explanations and good training material provided, we were able to get a really good idea of how to use the system. I also think that it was enough time to learn how to setup the system.
Xactly offers training on new releases on a monthly basis and training on basic principles regularly via registration. My experience with both is that they do not provide the in-depth knowledge necessary to truly master the system and advanced courses still do not go to the level needed to autonomously manage the system and plans. Professional services are a large part of any cloud based service such as Xactly and I feel a reliance on such paid consulting services is a great money-maker for Xactly.
We have been satisfied with the implementation overall. The person from Xactly professional team was on our site to support the implementation and give us guides and instructions on how to operate the system in our case. it was really helpful moments. We have learned what and how to test Xactly Incent
OpenX is less focused than MoPub and it has a bigger reach as it is not limited to the mobile app. Unlike MoPub that focuses on performance, OpenX comes from the branding world and is pushing into CTV and other areas of the industry more catered to traditional media agencies and not pure ad tech players.
I have been working on Incent since one year. I found it to be the greatest tool for calculating commissions. From credits to commissions to sketches, the system has it all, including the ability to conduct reports and statistics. It has a lot of features and customizations that are necessary for creating complex commission plans and calculating commissions. I enjoy its modern and user-friendly interface that makes the product more fascinating. Furthermore, the team's latest updates are excellent and make the product more effective and friendlier
It's very flexible. In most cases it can be adapted to your needs by programming which may cost extra money. We have a lot of different complans and close to 1.000 employees using Xactly in EMEA. It's mainly used by Sales and Finance
OpenX made it easy to manage online advertising. At the time I used the product I was the lead developer in charge of implementing the solution but quickly was put into the role of managing the traffic and training other users. It was really easy for a technical user to become a traffic manager. Getting other users trained and up to speed was very efficient.
We are able to quickly and easily identify duplicate credit and commission calculations through data extracts in Incent.
We have literally saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by identifying gaps in our sales operations processes, which were giving multiple people credits on the same deals, across multiple GEOs.
We have cut processing time by 75% through Xactly Incent automations versus calculating manually in Excel.
