The difference between the two is focus: one is on the product and customer focused, the other is focused solely on the enterprise. Never forget that an acquisition requires both!

Within most start-up, especially tech companies, it is common to have a CTO. After all, they are the technical leader for your core offering and are responsible for all engineering work. Their team built up all the required infrastructure to support and help your product grow into what it is today.

Ask yourself: if another department such as marketing or finance needed to procure some specialty hardware, or you need to on-board new employees, where do they go?

If your answer is they do it themselves, or it is all in the cloud, then you not only don’t have an IT department, but you also don’t have internal IT strategy. Having an ad-hoc nature to the back office means that fully integrating your acquisition will make for a very rough experience. Especially since the groups doing it themselves don’t have the technical chops, and your engineers are working on the product.

Even if you were to assign some of your engineering team to help with the integration efforts, they won’t know the business strategy (which is different from the product strategy), and they won’t know how the other parts of even your own company are managing things let alone know what questions to ask of the parts being acquired.

At best, if this is an acquisition to integrate another product into your own core offering, then there might be some reasonable success. However, if it is to acquire the customers from the other company to grow your business, then without a more complete and centralized understanding of how internal IT factors into things like operations, sales, and marketing not only work, but fit into the company’s direction, then your chances for failure increase dramatically.