Last week’s challenge:

There are always challenges when it comes to integrating the newly acquired company. One of the most interesting, and challenging is when you inherit technologies that you don’t normally use. Think of going from Azure to AWS as one example or HubSpot and Salesforce.

When you’re faced with incorporating tech from a competing vendor to your own, who do you turn to for guidance?

The most obvious answer would be your own people. After all, you’ve been through a lot together, and they’ve proven themselves time and again and would know your own system inside and out.

How much experience do they have with the stuff being incorporated?

You also have those coming with you from the acquired entity, but they will have the same issues as your team except a perspective from the other side. The advantage is that there could be an understanding that will provide a path forward. In the worst case, there will be gaps that neither side can address.

In some cases, such as data migrations, this difference doesn’t matter as much (and in face your vendors may even have tools to help facilitate this).

The other cases: especially when it comes to incorporating platforms you don’t normally use such as Kubernetes or cloud infrastructure platforms, then the challenges explode exponentially as does spending far more than you really should.

There will be peculiarities with the platforms and will depend on how deep the integration is with the components being conveyed. The thing is that most of the magic of the vendors almost always have some kind of deep integration magic that makes re-platforming challenging. This is where your vendors could help.

The drawback with relying on your vendors for this guidance is that they will provide the lift/shift solution for you including rewriting to take advantage of all the components they have in their arsenal. They might be familiar with the provider you are conveying from, but they won’t have the bigger context of how the code is supposed to function, and you will end up over-provisioning things you don’t really need. Not necessarily a bad thing, but will go against any cost synergies if that is one of the goals of the acquisition.

Optimally, this may be where you bring in an outside advisor who can bridge the gap and provide the holistic understanding that is required for a path forward that won’t break the bank. Yes this will be a separate cost, but it will also save time and money in the long term.

Who else could you turn to?

cab

If you find yourself in that last category or about to pull the trigger on an acquisition, then don’t hesitate to hit reply and we can chat.