The two companies will begin a merger of their operations this month, with the aim to make Strategic Imperatives’ Fibre Café platform the dominant market solution for ISPs to access wholesale fibre networks.
Founded in 2006, Strategic Imperatives specialises in SaaS provisioning, connectivity and monetisation solutions for the telecom industry. It has established itself as the principal provider of fixed line solutions into the Openreach network, provisioning, ceasing and migrating millions of connections.
The company 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 provide full fibre connectivity. The platform already integrates more than 3 million connections.
Established by worldwide telecom investors Granahan McCourt Capital, X3T launched last year with financial partners Asterion Industrial Partners, Oak Hill Advisors, Tetrad and Twin Point Capital.
The X3T platform is purpose-built for wholesale networks to allow a simple, seamless integration for ISPs to offer customer on-boarding, provisioning, and service activation. The platform has supported the integration of 62 global and regional ISPs and customer take-up of more than 50 per cent within 18 months.
Wail Sabbagh, managing director at Strategic Imperatives (pictured above, left), 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 (pictured above, right), said, “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.
He added, “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.”
The merger was supported by Clarkslegal acting for X3T and Russell-Cooke on behalf of Strategic Imperatives.