In a written statement on Friday the company announced that Özmen will start his new job by Feb. 15, 2010.
The statement said Özmen was chosen for his 17 years of experience in the Internet and technology sectors, where he worked in marketing as well as held management positions, in addition to a career in investment companies in Europe and the US. It also praised the new general manager’s success at Orange-France, whose annual turnover he helped increase by 250 percent, to 1.2 billion euros.
Özmen established and ran TouchLocal, which offers local search and Internet advertising services in London, before he joined the Orange-France team. Before this, he was the CEO of the Turkish company DOL. His career in the technology business started as part of the team that founded Priceline in the US in the mid 1990s.
Özmen expressed pleasure over his new job, commenting: “I am extremely happy to be joining Microsoft, one of the most important corporations of the world, and especially the Microsoft Turkey family, which has quite a strong team. I am excited to be working in Turkey again, a country with a young, dynamic and industrious population and one with a brisker economy with respect to many other emerging economies.” He graduated from İstanbul Technical University’s department of construction engineering and holds a master’s degree from Louisiana State University in industrial engineering.
