Starting with last week’s challenge:

In some cases, they will buy the company outright and trust the underlying people to continue to do their thing (with alterations along the way). However, there are some cases were a particular business unit is being divested into its own company. I cited some examples in the past, and in the news over the last week is the US Dept of Justice proposed remedy with Google to have it divest it’s Chrome browser.

Your challenge: supposing you were going to buy this divested unit, what would be some of the tech considerations you would need to make?

Regardless of the type of buyer, you will be looking at the following primary considerations:

  • The IT infrastructure to support the new staff.
  • A way to build and maintain the product (build and test servers, servers to host the project artifacts, analytics, etc.).
  • External calls where the product “phones home” that will need to be replaced to maintain existing functionality.

If you are a typical company, then you will already have the infrastructure for the first two considerations. However if you are a PE firm, then this is where you will need to procure the necessary components. Luckily in the SaaS world, you don’t need to worry about things like finding a datacenter and procurring physical hardware (but that doesn’t mean there are other cases where you would need to).

Looking at Google Chrome for example, they more than likely will have all of their build and release tooling based on their internal cloud, and by extension, would be able to leverage Google’s cloud platform (GCP). This will perhaps be the quickest/easiest to leverage in the short-term. However, if it were to go anywhere else, then all of this tooling will need to be modified to match the new environment/ecosystem.

The third part will be the most challenging. Especially given this is the main reason why it is being divested. You will be looking at hooks into their ad engine, user profile management, phoning home for updates, any crash analysis/debugging data, etc. Given this ties into the special sauce that makes the browser valuable, this is where the bulk of the engineering will end up going.

Does this match your expectations? If not, hit reply and let me know!

cab