Strategic Imperatives and X3T announce merger to accelerate connections between AltNets and ISPs

LONDON, Jan. 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Strategic Imperatives, the UK market leader in SaaS provisioning, connectivity and monetisation solutions for the telecom industry has today announced its merger with X3T, the services and technology company on a mission to empower connections between AltNets and Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The two companies will commence a merger of their operations this month with a vision to make Strategic Imperatives' Fibre Café platform the dominant solution in the market for ISPs to access wholesale fibre networks.

Founded in 2006, Strategic Imperatives quickly established itself as the principal provider of fixed line solutions into the Openreach network, provisioning, ceasing and migrating millions of connections. More recently, Strategic Imperatives has replicated this success in the UK's emerging fibre market with the development and rollout of Fibre Café, a SaaS platform transforming how AltNets and service providers collaborate to deliver the vision of full fibre connectivity. The platform already integrates over three million connections.

Established by worldwide telecom investors Granahan McCourt Capital, X3T launched last year with heavyweight financial partners Asterion Industrial Partners, Oak Hill Advisors, Tetrad and Twin Point Capital.

The X3T platform is purpose built for wholesale networks to facilitate a simple, seamless integration for ISPs, resulting in networks achieving extremely high (+90) Net Promotor Scores for customer on-boarding, provisioning, and service activation. Supporting National Broadband Ireland (NBI), widely regarded as one of the world's most ambitious rollouts of a national wholesale fibre network, the platform has supported the integration of 62 global and regional Internet Service Providers and customer take-up of over 50% within 18 months.

Wail Sabbagh, Managing Director at Strategic Imperatives, said: "Combining forces with X3T provides us with a unique opportunity to bring together some of the industry's most experienced talent and state-of-the-art technologies to deliver exceptional value to our customers. Supporting our vision to expand our ground-breaking monetisation, billing and subscriptions platform, Elevate, and make Fibre Café the leading unified interface to the UK's fibre ecosystem and the gateway to a connected Britain, we're excited to accelerate our continued investment and rollout with the financial backing and global expertise that this merger provides."

David McCourt, Chairman of Granahan McCourt Capital and X3T, commented: "For over 30 years, we have been building and operating large-scale networks all over the world, and we intimately understand the needs of wholesale operators. A decade ago, we built one of the first open-access networks in the world at a company called enet and quickly grew it to serve over 70 ISPs. In our next venture, NBI, we continued to build the next generation of our technology platform and now, at X3T, we've used our inherent knowledge of operating high performance wholesale networks to export our capabilities.

"This merger with Strategic Imperatives means we can share this knowledge and accelerate our support for customers in the UK and beyond. As an investor, owner and operator, we know first-hand that the combined capabilities of X3T and Strategic Imperatives provides the blueprint for AltNets and ISPs to scale," concluded McCourt.

The merger was supported by Clarkslegal acting for X3T and Russell-Cooke on behalf of Strategic Imperatives.

About Strategic Imperatives

Strategic Imperatives is the UK market leader in SaaS provisioning, connectivity and monetisation solutions for the telecom industry. Trusted by over 200 service providers to bill for a multitude of services and provision millions of fixed line and fibre connections, Strategic Imperatives has a proven track record in digital solutions that transform how customers do business.

Visit: www.imperatives.co.uk

About Granahan McCourt Capital (founder of X3T)
Granahan McCourt is a worldwide investor focused on the technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) industries. Granahan McCourt's principals have world-leading experience in designing, building and deploying large-scale telecoms infrastructure.

The firm's founder and CEO, David McCourt, has held senior roles as CEO or founding board member at some of the biggest global telecom network operators, including Level 3 Communications, MFS Communications, Corporate Communications Network and MCI WorldCom.

As the founder of National Broadband Ireland, the company responsible for delivering the largest Public Private Partnership in European telecoms (the Irish Government's $5billion National Broadband Plan), Granahan McCourt is credited with one of the world's most ambitious broadband rollouts. In a review of more than 16,000 megaprojects from over 20 fields in 136 countries (Oxford University, 2023) NBI is in the elite 0.5% for being on time, on budget, and delivering against policy.

Visit: www.granahanmccourt.com

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2323615/Wail_Sabbagh_and_Dave_McCourt_Jr.jpg