STRATA Sets New Standard for Media Buying with Enterprise Agency Management System Upgrade

CHICAGO, Sept. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- STRATA, a leading media buying and selling software provider, officially announced today the release of a major update to its Enterprise Agency Management platform. The system raises advertising agencies' level of productivity through a comprehensive suite of tools for planning, buying, stewardship, optimization and billing across all forms of media including the most advanced digital media.

This latest update is the result of a complete rewrite of STRATA's industry leading system, and is intended to bring new a new level of efficiency, scalability and real-time processing to the media buying industry.  The system provides built in connections to industry dashboards, report writers, and enhancements that will add precision and efficiency to the way agencies do business.

"With this initiative, we literally rewrote our entire system so our clients will have the most forward thinking technology at their fingertips," said Joy Baer, STRATA Executive Vice President.  "We want to make sure our clients are getting a media system that can keep pace with their business as it changes as opposed to spending money trying to work around an outdated legacy platform.  We push the envelope by keeping our technology current, pioneering e-Business initiatives and evolving our platforms with our clients' business."

The new system also provides tremendous extensibility in that it is written in current development languages, which can easily be extended to accommodate proprietary systems within an agency.  This allows agencies to differentiate themselves from their competition without requiring custom development.

"We looked at all of the platform's capabilities and asked ourselves how we could make this industry leading program even better," said Baer.  "The adage goes, 'if it isn't broke, then don't fix it.'  That wasn't good enough for us.  We wanted to not only make our system better for today, but also for the changing needs of agencies tomorrow."

Robert Burkhart, STRATA's Development Director in charge of the release pointed out an added benefit of the newly enhanced system.  "Scalability.  Agencies can add billions of dollars of media activity within a year and they have to be confident their platform will continue to operate flawlessly.  This platform can grow to accommodate the processing requirements of any size agency."

"The entire platform is based on Microsoft® technology.  Most of our agencies already use components such as Active Directory, SQL Server, Reporting Services, and Sharepoint.  It just made sense for us to leverage these technologies to make integration into their environment painless," added Burkhart.  

As an additional benefit, STRATA is packaging a Data Warehouse with the platform to allow for significantly more advanced reporting to present buying data directly from the system to intranets and extranets without needing to build any additional complicated solutions.

STRATA serves nearly half of all media buying firms, with its applications on more than 5,000 desktops at more than 900 agencies, and the company's end-to-end software also is used on more than 8,000 media seller desktops.

For more information: www.gotostrata.com, www.facebook.com/STRATA  and on Twitter - @gotostrata

ABOUT STRATA

STRATA is the nation's leading provider of media buying and selling software.  The custom solutions supplied by STRATA empower clients to sell and efficiently purchase all media types including cable, broadcast, newspaper, radio, outdoor and digital advertising mediums.  On average, over $50 Billion in advertising dollars flow through STRATA systems per year.

The whole-scale changes that are occurring in this fragmented media landscape require a customizable and convergent solution. STRATA provides the technology to enable organizations to lead rather than react.  By transforming the way advertisements are placed and tracked, STRATA adds efficiency and precision across traditional and emerging platforms.

Headquartered in Chicago, STRATA has been supplying solutions to the media buying and selling industry since 1983.  STRATA is owned by Comcast Cable http://www.comcast.com/.  For more information, visit http://www.gotostrata.com or call (800) 9 STRATA.

SOURCE STRATA