XWL is an independent NZ owned company that has been successfully providing IT services and support to businesses in New Zealand from its Wellington headquarters since 1993.
A lot has changed in IT in that time, not the least of which has been the massive explosion in the use of email, and unfortunately, in the volume and impact of spam.
Our company name has become a victim of that rise of spam. When we originally came up with the name “xannax”, to us it was simply a catchy palindrome that stood out a bit from the crowd, with, we thought, no real-world associations or connotations: simply a made up name.
But move ahead a decade or so, and we discover that the word “xannax” is now being treated as a spam keyword by the world’s spam filtering systems. This is because the word “xannax” is only one letter different from an anti-depressant drug that is “marketed” by spammers.
The impact on our business and our customers has been that increasingly emails that we send out, or people send to us, are trapped by spam filters and thus don’t get delivered – purely because of the “xannax” spam word issue.
To alleviate this problem, a few years back we changed our domain name and email addresses from xannax.co.nz to xwl.co.nz. This helped, but unfortunately has not proved to be a complete solution. Whenever we or our customers use the word “xannax” in the text of an email, it is still at risk of being blocked by the spam filters.
So now we are taking what we hope will be the final step in fixing this problem, and re-branding as XWL. We will stop using the words “XannaX Works”, and instead refer to ourselves in all our marketing and public facing information as XWL.
We are not changing our legal name from XannaX Works Limited, so you will see that mentioned once on our legal documents. We are now effectively XannaX Works Limited, trading as XWL.
We’ve also implemented a new logo – the blue-lined globe with “XWL” underneath, which we hope you will like; and a new “tag” line of “IT services for business”. We wanted something that was short yet encompassed the considerable breadth of what we do, whilst avoiding grandiosity and hyperbole, which we think that achieves.
Over the next few months we will be working to update all our public facing information with the new XWL name and logo, and re-training ourselves to say “xwl” instead of “xannax” – which is going to take quite some effort on our part after all these years using the xannax name!
Other than the new name and logo, our contact details are not changing. Same people, same locations and same customer focused service.
If you have any questions about this, please call me on 04 499 9679 or email me at stephen.h@xwl.co.nz
Stephen Harcourt