Whether you are looking at a merger, acquisition, or divestiture, the tech involved can easily fit into 3 buckets:

  • The tech that power your business
  • The tech that you are either carving out or bringing over
  • The tech that you must bring in to bridge the other two

Regardless of the bucket, there will always be some common components. In the best case, this would be email and productivity suite where there might be a single IT org and you can just feed the data in. This is normally the group that manages the central IT parts of the company.

Where the fun begins is the tech that extends beyond the common enterprise components. If you are a tech company, think of the difference between the engineering side of the house and operations. Or if you’re a more traditional business, the different lines of business that manages their own projects and budgets.

The thing is that there are some technologies that cross domains for things such as user and access management, common libraries used by all internal software, and common apps that have APIs exposed to feed into a central authority whether it is ERP, HR, or even change management.

If you are looking at an M&A, then you will need to look at how how to plug it into your common infrastructure. When you are divesting, then you are looking at two questions:

  1. How do we carve this out without impacting our own business?
  2. What will we need to support until the transition is complete?

What apps or infrastructure do you see being impacted if you were asked to integrate or divest?

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