SAP services provider Oxygen has celebrated its tenth birthday, at the same time as its parent, Australia’s UXC, has taken itself off the market as an acquisition target.
Last year, UXC announced it had been in talks with potential buyers, but no deal was struck. A spokesman for Oxygen yesterday told Computerworld that a sale was “pretty much off the table and now it is business as usual.” UXC acquired Oxygen in 2005.
Oxygen grew out of Carter Holt Harvey’s IT department; it was established in 2001 to offer other organisations services in implementing SAP, drawing on the experience of the original Oxygen staff in implementing SAP at Carter Holt Harvey.
In a statement announcing Oxygen’s tenth anniversary, CEO Mike Smith says: “The idea was to take the intellectual property and human capital developed by Carter Holt Harvey’s internal IT department and create a standalone specialist SAP services company.”
The original idea of making CHH’s SAP expertise into a commercial asset for the company was that of expat New Zealander Chris Liddell, formerly chief financial officer of Microsoft and General Motors, who was CEO at Carter Holt at the time.
The project turned “a Carter Holt Harvey cost centre into a wholly owned but separate profit centre, reducing CHH’s overall IT costs and – eventually – recouping CHH’s investment via a commercial sale”, Smith says.