If you need to choose between speed and cost, then you may want to check out yesterday’s email. However, if you need to choose between cost and quality, then you’ve come to the right place!

The cost and quality part of the integration budget equation plays on several interrelated factors:

  • The people to perform the integration work
  • Going for an open source solution over vendor or developing in-house
  • Buying new infrastructure vs migrating the pre-existing components

In some cases the cost is an actual dollar amount, and others are in risk.

For the people, the type of people to retain from the company being acquired if they are rock stars within their organization vs the specialist that needs to come in who understands the old and new world vs the professional services firms doing the porting work. Each has a cost and variable quality, and yet this is also where yesterday’s time knob can come in.

The open source solution may be of higher quality, however it is not entirely free in that there is no support and most of the heavy lifting will have to be done by someone. Contrast that with a vendor solution that may do 75% of what is required and cost more up-front, but will require a lot less time to implement.

Lastly, there’s something to be said for buying duplicate pieces of infrastructure to facilitate the data transfer than paying to ship the servers and run the risk of them being damaged in transit. Additionally, you won’t need to necessarily worry about how they will come up and what other parts of infrastructure you maybe missing when you are controlling where the data goes.

What other knobs could you turn?

cab

PS: I will be in London for the Financial Times: Due Diligence summit on the week of October 7. If you happen to be in the area and would like to meet up, hit REPLY and let me know!