New CEO, New Financing On Way For XOR

Solution provider XOR this week named its chairman, former SHL Systemhouse chief John Oltman, as the company's new CEO. He replaces former CEO Greg Jacobsen, who quietly left the company at the end of last month.

In addition, the Boulder, Colo.-based company has closed $7 million in new financing from investors, including existing shareholder Frontenac Company and Lexington Partners.

Jacobsen, who steered XOR through the e-business boom last year as well as the bubble burst and economic slowdown that followed, parted ways with XOR after its board of directors decided the timing was right to make a management change.

Oltman says the decision to have Jacobsen part ways with XOR came several weeks ago after the two men met with the company's investors and board of directors to discuss the company's future.

"We are obviously going through the transformation right now from a company that was doing a lot of outsourcing for dot coms to a company that is now selling outsourced-based solutions into mainstream companies," says Oltman. "It was a fairly big change and a long journey for Greg. We decided that maybe at the point of this financing it was a good time for us to make a transition."

Oltman has more than 25 years of experience as an executive officer in the solution provider industry, most notably as chairman and CEO of $1.2 billion systems integrator and outsourcing company SHL Systemhouse and as executive chairman of TSW International, a global leader in asset care software and services. He was also a senior partner with the former Andersen Consulting and has served as an advisor, board member and investor in a number of other high-tech companies, including Exult, Lante and Evolve Software.

While at Systemhouse, Oltman led the company through the recession of the early 1990s and helped it position itself for future growth. It's that experience that XOR shareholders felt was right for the current economic and market conditions.

"As XOR moves into its next phase of growth, it is exciting to have someone of John's stature at the helm," said Paul Carbery, XOR director and managing partner of Frontenac, in a statement. "Internet technologies will soon become just another element of the corporate IT infrastructure for running and adapting core business processes, and John's experience in scaling technology and outsourcing companies will be invaluable."

The company says the additional funding will help it build new solutions targeting what it calls 'urgent business problems' in its target industry verticals: retail and consumer packaged goods, banking and insurance and media and communications.

Oltman says his immediate priorities are to bring XOR to break-even status as quickly as possible and to continue to built it into a strong outsourcing company that leverages deep vertical solutions.

"We are going to continue to focus on solutions for business problems that can be solved by the real-time Internet or making process adaptation or dynamic resource adaptation in real-time," he says.

Looking a little further out, Oltman says his main goal is to get XOR running at $25 million a quarter by the first quarter of 2003.

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