There was a challenge I posed to the list called Moving Sale:

Continuing the theme of the week lets look at what prep work would be required prior to the close of the sale. In this case, Acme Inc. went in on the cloud software offering by offering Anvils as a Service, and this will be offloaded to Widgets Inc. as its own unit including about half the current employees working on the product. The product itself is also cloud based, but runs on a different cloud provider from what Widgets Inc. uses.

What common pieces would be impacted as a part of this carve-out, but would not be conveyed to Widgets Inc.? As a follow-up question, would you make the common pieces available, and if so, how?

The first part of the answer looked at the end user/employee aspect as common enterprise data where nothing else would be conveyed so it would be up to the acquirer to figure out how to integrate.

Today we look at a second part of the answer which looks at the tech side of users and what to do about the customer data.

User management is always enterprise based and very specific to the organization. If we’re talking employees, then an appropriate mapping between the two organizations as well as how the roles get mapped to their access, and what that looks like with the new owner will be critical for ensuring compliance.

Customer data, depending on how they’re created and managed, could be just as complex as the employees being moved over or as simple as a database dump. Additionally, this is the one area where it depends on how it is set-up. I’ve seen cases where the customer accounts and employees were stored in the same database, I’ve seen other cases where it would be the same database, but there would be org specific databases to augment the data, and I’ve seen cases where it is entirely org based.

If you are looking to buy the customers from another company, this is a critical distinction to keep in mind as you have those conversations between day 0 and day 1.

I’ll note that this is more for access controls and the data that powers the custom applications that are either being conveyed or incorporated into your pre-existing offerings. The access controls for ensuring regulatory compliance, but the customer data is the true gold that will drive the success of the acquisition.

What other things can you think of? Reply and let me know so we can keep the exchange going!

cab