• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 6, 2008

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Amid an atmosphere charged with buzz and speculation, two new digital age data processing systems - Donovan Data Systems new iDesk and rival MediaBank's OX - were unveiled publicly for the first time Wednesday during the opening day of the American Association of Advertising Agencies' Media Conference and Trade Show here. Both companies gave agency insiders a chance to kick some tires during closed door committee meetings in the morning, and then DDS chief Michael Donovan gave a public presentation and status report on iDesk following and "ebiz for media" opening panel discussion in the afternoon.

Reactions were muted, as attendees said they were unclear how operational the new systems actually are. MediaBank, the newest kid on Madison Avenue's data processing front, has had its birth by fire, as it was forced to accelerate its product development in time for its charter digital media client Starcom MediaVest Group to meet a Dec. 31, 2007 deadline. That's when DDS pulled its plug on all of SMG's media buys, following a long, and somewhat public dispute that was triggered in part, by SMG's backing of MediaBank. SMG is known to still have some issues associated with transitioning to the new system.

DDS' Donovan, meanwhile, unveiled what looked on Powerpoint slides to be exactly the kind of state-of-the-art digital media processing system that agencies - including SMG - have been craving for, though a few in the room during its public unveiling observed that it likely is more than coincidental that it is seeing light nearly a year after DDS' fall out with SMG over plans to launch a rival service.

Even now, Donovan said the system still is in beta in the U.S. and the U.K. at several big, but undisclosed agency holding companies, and would become available publicly in about a month, with plans to expand its capabilities throughout 2008.

The system operates on the kind of Oracle and Java-based infrastructure that agencies have been calling for, and Donovan said it's already capable of interconnecting with the online ad industry's largest ad serving organization - DoubleClick - and that the second largest - Atlas - would be on it when it goes operational in April. Over the next year, Donovan said iDesk would incorporate most of the other significant third-party ad servers into its system.

Asked if the new system had been field tested and received input from any major online publishing organizations, Donovan said, "Yes, MSN. So we did get a publisher point of view," but did not disclose what those elements might have been.

Donovan also hinted at the fact that iDesk would be DDS' pathway for a new infrastructure and way of processing buys for all media, as all media increasingly become digitally based. Referring to addressable television as the industry's new "Holy Grail," Donovan, said, "We plan to handle all the other things like search VOD by the end of the year."

The public view of MediaBank's new OX system, and its companion AX analytics system, was more circumspect among attendees who were not yet familiar with its capabilities, but many of whom said they planned to stop by the company's exhibit booth over the next couple of days. The MediaBank booth, symbolically, is located at the opposite end of the AAAA conference's trade show from the DDS booth.