OpenX specialist Erik Geurts has worked with hundreds of clients around the globe
Erik Geurts is the world’s most experienced independent OpenX Specialist, offering support, training and consulting for OpenX Ad Server since 2004. He also develops plugins for OpenX and runs an advanced server platform for OpenX hosting. He started all this after working in various positions in management consulting, project management, and systems development for large corporations including Time Warner and Deloitte.
Erik holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration and Information Management, and lives with his wife in The Netherlands. He likes cooking, swimming, and listening to soul and jazz music.
If you need support for OpenX Ad Server, just contact Erik for a free quote.
Education and career
Born in 1965, Erik Geurts grew up in The Netherlands. After primary school and college, he got a Master’s degree in Business Administration and Information Management from Tilburg University in 1990. After a few short term positions, in 1993 Erik landed a job as information analyst at the EMEA headquarters of Time Warner Publishing in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Soon after, his role changed to include project management. From 1996 to 2000 he worked at Dutch IT consultancy firm Consultdata (acquired by Deloitte in 1999) as IT Consultant, and in 2000 joined Dutch IT consultancy firm Ordina as a business consultant, project manager and later management consultant.
Entrepreneur since 1992
Erik Geurts started his IT business ‘on the side’ in 1992, offering systems development services to small businesses. In 1994, while beta-testing soon-to-be-released Windows 95, he was first introduced to a large scale public network, MSN. Back then, the internet was already a fact of life, but the World Wide Web was not very well known yet. Tim Berners-Lee, while at CERN, invented the web in the 1980s but it took more than 10 years before it really got the world’s attention. In 1996, CompuServe introduced a subscription that enabled users to create very rudimentary web sites and that was also the very first time Erik started developing web sites.
Working with OpenX Ad Server since 2004
Around 2002, working on websites became not just a fun way to spend free time, but suddenly also a serious business. Advertising and affiliate schemes started to bring in some money to pay for the hosting of the sites, and ListMessenger.net was profitable from day one. Making changes to the websites to put in or take out ad campaigns was becoming daily work at the time. Purely by coincidence Erik Geurts discovered the free open source ad server software OpenX in early 2004 (back then it was still called phpAdsNew and it also carried the name Openads for a while in 2007). Quickly after installing it and implementing it on my sites, it became clear how powerful the software was. Erik joined the OpenX support forum in May 2004 in search of additional information, but soon discovered he was able to help many others with their questions. In early 2006, Erik started receiving requests for consulting and training projects related to OpenX. Nowadays, he has worked with hundreds of clients on various OpenX projects.
Full time OpenX specialist
In early 2007 Erik started working part time in his ‘regular’ job, so he could spend more time on his own business and the OpenX support projects that kept coming in. He wanted to find out if it was as much fun as anticipated. And it was! He also found out that his work was very much in demand and clients were lining up.
Toward the end of 2007 Erik decided to take the final step, leave his job completely and become a full time independent OpenX specialist. And the rest, as they say, is history.
On May 23, 2008, exactly 4 years after joining the OpenX forums, Erik was interviewed for the OpenX blog.
In the fall of 2009, together with former OpenX senior developer Matteo Beccati, Erik founded the AdserverPlugins.com project, developing enterprise grade plugins for the OpenX ad server software. Hosting services for OpenX were added to the company in 2008, and have grown into a platform capable of serving billions of ad impressions per month.
Websites and e-mail marketing
Both at work and at home, Erik was heavily involved in internet, intranet and web projects. In 1996 he created his first personal website, with stories and photos from vacations abroad (in Dutch), still available on the web today. In 2000, having a broadband internet connection at my home became possible and affordable, and this was also the moment he started his second website www.zowerkt.nl (also in Dutch) with educational articles for all age groups. Update: in early 2010 this site was sold. For this site he wanted to send out e-mail newsletters to inform subscribers about new articles. After sending out a few using just a regular e-mail program, in 2002 he discovered a piece of software called ListMessenger Pro. After using this product for a few months, Erik realized its business potential, and in 2003 started a subscription based newsletter sending service called ListMessenger.net.
More information
Please review the project formalities for OpenX consulting and company details.
