John Perkins became the new managing director of National Computing Centre, which remained a not-for-profit membership organisation.
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.
[3] At this point, the National Computing Centre sold its shares in NCC Group as did Pearse, Bird and Sadler who left the business.
Following the retirement of Perkins, Michael Gough[4] was appointed as CEO in 2000 and NCC pursued a new strategy of rapidly developing and expanding its membership services by acquisition.
After 2000, and particularly after the second sale of its shares in NCC Group in 2003, acquisitions accelerated to acquire a number of related companies, membership organisations, publications, publishing rights and to fund joint ventures.
The acquisitions included: Management Consultancy News; Conspectus; CIO Connect; The Construction Industry Computing Association; Certus; The Evaluation Centre; Institute of IT Training; The Impact Programme; and PMP.
Funds were spent attempting to develop new products and services including web hosting which did not prove commercially successful.
In March 2008, Steve Markwell was appointed as Chief Executive[12] but there was no improvement in the company's fortunes or significant change in strategic direction.
[13] With losses and the size of the pension fund deficit increasing, the company was unable to meet its obligations and was placed into administration by its management.
It would appear that from this point NCC Ltd was no longer recognised by any trade body, association or any part of government as the "voice of the computer user"[citation needed] and offered no substantial services to its client base and became a shell company.