National Computing Centre

The National Computing Centre was founded on 10 June 1966 by the Labour government, as an autonomous not-for-profit organisation, to be the "voice of the computer user", encourage the growth of computer usage in the UK and ensure that the necessary education and training was made available. NCC was one of the visible outcomes from Harold Wilson's "White heat of technology" speech and the formation of a Ministry of Technology, the others being the computer company International Computers Limited (ICL) and chip maker Inmos (both now defunct).

Initially, most income came directly from government grants, but with the growth of NCC's commercial operations this ceased in 1989. During the 1970s and 1980s NCC had a joint venture with Blackwell Publishing (NCC Blackwell) which was a significant publisher of academic computing books.

Between 1989 and 1996, NCC operated with five main divisions – education, consulting, escrow, membership services, and system engineering deriving income from membership fees and its commercial activities.

A valued component was the Computer Validation Service, which ran Validation testing for Fortran 77 and Pascal. These validation tests were issued in accordance with a reciprocal agreement with General Services Administration in the United States.

In 1999, it sold its commercial divisions (turnover of less than £10 million), which provided escrow, consultancy, system engineering services to its existing management team supported by ECI Ventures for £5 million. This new company was named NCC Services Limited and later became NCC Group Limited of which the National Computing Centre held a 20% share. John Perkins became the new managing director of National Computing Centre, which remained a not-for-profit membership organisation.

The NCC Services Ltd management team of managing director Chris Pearse and directors John Morris, Peter Bird, and Chris Sadler was strengthened in March 2000 by the appointment of Rob Cotton as Finance Director and who also took over control of the Escrow division in May of that year, with Morris leaving at that time. Following a substantial fall off of revenues as Y2K came and passed, and due to the failure of the company before this date to invest in its general consultancy, security, system engineering and escrow business during the Y2K period, the group began to make monthly losses before the benefits of the changes to the escrow business instigated by Rob Cotton were felt and the company returned to profitability.

Renamed NCC Group, in May 2000, and with escrow now the cornerstone of the group, Rob Cotton led a secondary management buy-out in 2003 valuing NCC Group at £30 million and supported by Barclays Private Equity. At this point, the National Computing Centre sold its shares in NCC Group as did Pearse, Bird and Sadler who left the business. The NCC Group subsequently floated on the AIM stock market in 2004 for £55 million and was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2007 with a market capitalisation of nearly £390 million as of June 2014.