Concert Communications Services

In 1992, Sir Iain Vallance's SCOOP project in BT (later called Project Sovereign ), objective was to rid the organisation of its Civil Service culture, and create a strategy to develop to create a global-level competitive group. This needed two deliverables in the business plan:

UK based "the customer is King" approach, with a structure focused on specific market sectors

global carrier level services, which removed the problem of B-end delivery by owning the whole route. At the time, international telecommunications services were based on agreements between national telecommunication providers wholly "owning" their countries territory.

Concert was developed to address the second deliverable — the conductor of global business. It was recognised in the strategy for Concert, that the organisation (i.e. - BT and Concert combined) could not own the world - nor would it want to, as some markets may be key to certain customers, but not to the overall strategy. Secondly, the regulation of global communications was broken down into national, regional, and global based regulators — to address them all would be highly complex, but most importantly slow rollout speed of the service. Resultantly, Concert had to be seen to be an independent organisation of its founder BT.