Many mergers and acquisitions fail to deliver in full on their objectives. Synergies don’t happen, savings aren’t made, and rationalization doesn’t occur.
In trying to address this, boards of directors and chief executives have long focused on areas that they saw as the bigger prizes—headcount reductions and procurement savings. But in the search for bigger and better returns from mergers and acquisitions, attention is turning afresh to IT, and the realization of savings and efficiencies from the combined IT estate.
For many businesses, the biggest challenge is establishing the facts that enable them to answer key questions and determine the appropriate strategies moving forward:
Such questions are easy to ask, but much more difficult to answer. Paper-based audits take months, are costly in terms of effort and resources, and generally turn out to be unacceptably inaccurate. In a tightly-choreographed post-merger or acquisition timetable, something that takes months—and which is not only costly, but also inaccurate—is not something that any CIO or IT director can support.
The logical conclusion: interrogate the corporate IT estate itself, to get at the answers—quickly, accurately, and cost-effectively.
Discovery is the foundation on what all activities should be planned. You can’t understand costs or plan a successful integration of technology without knowing what you have; hardware, the software running on that hardware, but also more complex areas such as cloud or databases.
Knowing all the software that is installed across the estate allows you to understand the scope of what you now have. Agentless discovery is an easy way to search your network to find and catalog all your hardware, cloud instances and software applications, and then normalize the data and present it in a consistent format that’s easy to search.
But finding things is just the start. Being able to identify, correctly name, and enrich which information such as retail price, end of life, or license type brings an amazing amount of knowledge to this previously hidden area.
Quickly securing accurate insights into hardware and cloud resources in use, together with data on software installed and SaaS applications, coupled with granular usage information, enables IT teams to make strategic decisions on refresh, migrations, and rationalization. Asset intelligence enable you to answer key questions and make informed decisions:
As the merger and acquisition process takes place, significant savings can be quickly attained by taking a proactive approach to software portfolio rationalization based on an understanding of what software is available in the newly combined IT estate and to what extent it is used (under/over-utilization).
When performing a cost analysis to determine how to consolidate, upgrade, and retire software, follow these best practices: