adCenter Analytics beta closing: Goodbye, Gatineau

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red-sunset-casey1 If you’re an adCenter Analytics (ACA) beta customer, or you’ve read my colleague Mel’s posting over on the adCenter Community site, you’ll know that we’ve decided to close the ACA beta program at the end of the year.

In some senses, this is a sad day for me, since ACA (then known as Gatineau) was the first project I worked on when I came to Microsoft back in 2006, and even though I moved off it early last year, I’ve stayed in close contact with the ACA team since. But in assessing my own reaction to this news, it’s important to separate out the damage to my ego from a more level-headed assessment of this news. And in the latter regard, I’m full of optimism.

I know from the time I spent on the project and from talking to the team since that we have learned a great deal about the kinds of analytical capabilities that we need to provide throughout our ad platform to enable our advertisers and publishers to get the best value out of working with us. And let me be clear: analytics is tremendously important. But this announcement reflects a conclusion that we’ve come to that, for us, providing analytics in the form of a standalone tool like ACA doesn’t present the best value or utility for our customers.

Of course, it’s not my place to be making ad hoc pronouncements about our analytics product strategy, especially not at a moment like this; so I’ve probably said enough already. But I’d like to add my personal thanks to all of you who took the time to try out ACA and provide us with valuable feedback and ideas. Hopefully we provided some value for you along the way.

3 thoughts on “adCenter Analytics beta closing: Goodbye, Gatineau”

  1. It was quite sad to remove the ACA tags from my site today.
    I have had the privilege of meeting members of the ACA team in the last couple of years and I concur with you that the team worked very hard.
    As a result of their work there were a bunch of key differentiating features in ACA (campaigns reports, visualizations ….). They pushed other vendors to work harder.
    I am sure Microsoft will absorb the innovative work on ACA into other products and services.
    -Avinash.

  2. Hey, forget it. A great entrepreneur is always up to new stuff. Failure is unpredictable, and I’m sure you’ll succeed soon, comming with good quality and brand new stuff. I’m already waiting for great news!!
    Marcelo
    *Straight away from Brazil
    Cheers!

  3. Too bad, I was really looking forward to a good standalone product. I have 5 servers running Deepmetrix Livestats XSP 6/7/8, and I was waiting for a good successor to roll out of the MS factory..
    Could you perhaps suggest another standalone log analyzer?

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