Maybe not an issue for the kids these days, but there was once a time where your phone’s list of contacts was just on your phone. You had a T9 keypad that made changes very painful.

Things improved depending on the type of phone you had. Maybe you were lucky enough to have a SIM card that could store your contacts, or a data sync cable that allowed to you to sync your contacts onto your computer.

The coming of BlackBerry ushered in the first concept of synchronizing contacts with their own proprietary sync protocol and backup solution. This required a computer to act as the primary source of truth, but made upgrades painless.

Fast-forward to the coming of the Android devices. For the first, time, your phone was no longer the primary device for storing your contacts. Gmail became the primary source of your contacts and wherever you signed in, everything followed.

Now, you want to jump devices. What would it take to ensure you still have your contacts? In the old days, someone (such as a much younger me) would have written a program that can look at a backup file and import the contacts into the new device.

Today, all of this information is “in the cloud” so then the question becomes, where do you trust with your data long term? Your two options (and this is the M&A tie-in):

  • You can pay to keep both and find a shim to ensure the data is in sync. (Faster, but more expensive, and may not be doable long-term depending on the terms of your agreement)
  • You can migrate the data to your preferred trusted provider whether cloud based, or self-hosted.

Depending on the acquisition goals, situation, integration budget, and timelines from closing to final conveyance, will dictate your approach.

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