What advice would you give to CIOs currently dealing with acquisitions?
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You want to have consistent principles and repeatable processes where the opportunity presents itself. These should address who to communicate with, what kind of milestones you set, and what day one looks like. The principles of the activity are critical. The first time I used them was when Brocade acquired McDATA. They were a slightly bigger company than us and I was responsible for all of the IT infrastructure and the due diligence for evaluating it ahead of time.
The biggest principle established was on adopting or divesting technology: pick whichever one is the best. We do an evaluation and if the best tech is currently employed at McDATA, then we bring in McDATA to replace what we're doing at Brocade, otherwise, whatever is being used at McDATA gets retired. The other principles address adding new people, maintaining additional data stores, and offsite storage or redundant data centers. Establish primary principles up front and use them to guide all of your decisions. If you don’t, you’ll drive up frustration levels and extend the time-to-value.
A couple decades ago, the Australian New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) acquired National Bank of New Zealand. The initial thinking was that the National Bank’s customer data would all be hosted on ANZ’s banking platform. I can't remember how much they spent in due diligence, but it was at least 18 months before they realized that National Bank had the superior customer system. It made more sense to take just the New Zealand division of ANZ, rather than the entire group, and move that customer base over to National Bank even though it was a bigger portfolio. So I think that first principle is key: find out who's doing it better and don't just assume that the acquiring company has the better tech.
For companies that are constantly acquiring, having an integration management office (IMO) and an M&A playbook helps a lot. I’m now at ZoomInfo, and we do three to four per year on average. There are tons of work streams, so you want a playbook with all the work streams like HR, go to market, and systems. It’s also critical to have metrics by work stream.