Outside of the primary goals of the acquisition, the two that have an impact for the underlying lines of business tend to consist of:

  • Capturing synergies
  • Capturing value

This is usually done by reviewing who’s doing what along with the tools in use, and removing the duplicates. Think tool consolidation or reducing headcount. This is easy and has a dollar value associated with it. The low hanging fruit that addresses the first bullet item.

What does capturing value look like?

Think of this more as streamlining processes and picking up techniques from the team you may be on-boarding (whether to help with the integration or transition permanently).

There is something else that has been become quite the enabler over the past few years, and that is cloud computing. I don’t mean the various SaaS providers out there (okay maybe some), but instead looking at the cloud vendors as data-centers built on software.

One of the great things about software is the ease and infinite possibilities. Additionally, with multiple cloud vendors, you don’t have to make the investment to test out the alternate vendor. You just bought a company with expertise.

When you get ready to look at how to integrate the new company, consider the longer term direction you will be going, and rather than just migrate everything into your data center/chosen cloud provider, what new capabilities could you leverage?

That is capturing the true value.