Your company has just announced an acquisition.
That’s great news—your business is growing, and opportunities abound. It also means you will have to align the acquired company’s IT infrastructure with your own. What this looks like will vary depending on the specifics of any given merger. In some cases, where the acquired entity will continue to operate independently, you may simply look for opportunities to optimize and create economies of scale. At the other end of the spectrum, you will be responsible for fully integrating the new company into your existing infrastructure. And, of course, there are infinite variations within that range. Even if you are asked to perform due diligence before the acquisition, you will have to identify the potential challenges, risks, and system optimization opportunities.
In all cases, you need to understand the rhythm of their data center—which will be different than yours. Then you need to figure out what changes need to be made to meet strategic objectives and maximize efficiency. And finally, you must execute with minimal disruption and surprises. Given the complexity of enterprise IT infrastructures, this process is exceedingly difficult. It’s also expensive. According to PWC, 78% of successful M&A organizations spent 6% or more of deal value on integration. By comparison, only 56% of other respondents (i.e., those that didn’t rise to a level deemed “successful”) spent at that rate.
What if your company is prepping to be acquired?
It’s not just the acquiring entities that benefit from investing in understanding the integration implications of their infrastructures. If your company is looking to be acquired, doing this work can be a valuable part of the “courting” process. First, it enables you to optimize your data center, increasing efficiencies and reducing costs—both of which help increase the attractiveness of your business overall as an acquisition target. According to Accenture, technology can directly or indirectly drive up to 40% of overall merger synergies, and viewing technology as a value lever is crucial to deal success. Therefore, having a clear picture of your IT infrastructure will help you identify and articulate potential synergies. And finally, you can enable a potential acquirer to confidently evaluate integration implications in a fact-based manner.
#KnowBeforeYouGo for M&A IT infrastructure integration success
Whichever side of the M&A process you’re on, you can set your pre-acquisition due diligence and post-acquisition integration up for success with a Virtana #KnowBeforeYouGo engagement. Whatever environments your infrastructure runs—virtual machines, physical servers, or Kubernetes—this turnkey solution, which leverages Virtana’s Infrastructure Performance Management and Workload Placement technologies, will quickly provide you with data science-backed and data-driven information to inform your integration strategies and project plans.
The first step is discovery, which uncovers the state and rhythm of your data center. You get an inventory; a health, utilization, and performance baseline assessment; data cleansing; and application discovery leveraging lexical proximity and port signature recognition.
Then, once we know what you have, we build a picture of how it all works with application dependency mapping and move groups. You get a detailed application dependency map, as well as move group suggestions based on shared services and community detection. This information is crucial to identify platforms or applications that perform the same business function or shared services.
For workloads that you’ve targeted for cloud migration, we then perform cloud costing, where we identify cloud configuration and cost. You get a fit/unfit scorecard, time-series based rightsized configurations, and rightsized cloud costs for compute, storage disks, and egress traffic—and the results are grouped by “as-is,” “peak values,” and 99th and 95th percentiles. Optionally, we can also perform playback to test it all before you make any commitments, giving you a validated fit/unfit scorecard, validated cloud configurations, and validated cloud costs.
Are you ready to #KnowBeforeYouGo?
If your company is embarking on an M&A journey and you need to get smarter about IT infrastructure integration, contact us.
Ricardo Negrete
