News
Oxygen8 comes up for air
Tim Green Sep 5 2008, 12:57pm
Opera Telecom has re-branded as Oxygen8, following an MBO led by new CEO Shane Leahy.
The new identity seals a year of total re-invention for the company, which offers various interactive voice and SMS services to corporates, broadcasters and media brands.
As Opera, it was strongly linked with the TV voting scandals that rocked the UK premium telco services industry. Most notably Opera was dropped by UK broadcaster GMTV in April 2007 after 'irregularities' in the counting of competition entries.
Despite the bad publicity at the time, the firm actually increased its turnover in the last 12 months, and has flourishing operations in Australia, South Africa, Tanzania, UK and US. In the UK it works with clients including O2, Tesco Mobile, Johnston Press and Northcliffe Media.
In addition to re-naming itself, Oxygen8 has focused strongly on compliance.
It invested in new systems, closely audits every potential new customer (it’s turned some away), trains all staff in compliance and has a board member in charge of this area. As a result it has received no official complaints from PhonePayPlus in the last year.
Shane Leahy is now the majority shareholder, having bought shares from its previous boss Gary Corbett, who remains a non-exec director. Colin White is the new UK CEO and CFO.
Leahy said: "We've invested heavily in a new technical infrastructure and put a significant amount of money into ongoing research and development. We've also put new compliance in place and completed an entire review of the business.”
