by: VMware Senior Director, IT Mergers and Acquisitions Romy Kaura
Despite the current strong deal environment, most merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions miss generating their expected value or return on investment. The main reasons are increased deal complexity, technical and cultural missteps, and high employee turnover—especially if those involved are millennials.
In earlier blogs, we touched upon how VMware IT does M&A integration as well as how we effectively gauge and articulate its complexity. In this blog, we will highlight how VMware leverages its own products to balance and address a variety of challenges common to M&A deals.
IT becomes a pressure cooker, and not by choice
Once an M&A deal is finalized, there is intense pressure to move fast and ensure the acquired company’s employees are productive from the start—and that deal synergies are realized. Teams must effectively integrate the acquired company while maximizing cost synergies, all within a tightly constrained budget. Oftentimes the burden of accomplishing these goals falls on IT as they are tasked with working the magic behind the scenes.
Problems arise when IT starts ‘looking under the covers’, figuring out how to nurture the IP, and how to best ensure new employees are productive from Day One. Technologies utilized must balance the complexities and tremendous challenges inherent in the following M&A components:
- Business continuity
- Employee productivity
- Security & compliance
- Budget & time constraints
- Change management
- Fluid scope
- Seamless access to corporate resources
- Network integration & consolidation
- Flex compute capacity
- Workload migration
- Hosted infrastructure footprint
- Enterprise application access, control, and management
Luckily, the right tools offer the right results
Given the gravity of these various M&A issues, VMware IT decided to employ proven tools such as VMware Workspace ONE®, VMware Horizon® desktop virtualization, and VMware NSX® hybrid cloud. Combined, these tools ensure networks, infrastructure, and systems of the two companies in question are integrated in a timely and secure manner.
For example, Workspace ONE helps provide secure access to apps and tools for new/existing employees during interim and end-state M&A integration. It accomplishes this feat by offering a simple, easy-to-use single sign-on (SSO) and a unified app catalog that encompasses assets of both companies, resulting in effective change management. These features are backed by enterprise-grade security and policy-driven application management that also includes central monitoring/management.
Similarly, IT leverages NSX hybrid cloud to address M&A challenges concerning secure connectivity, new capacity requirements, and workload migration. Applications can be easily firewalled from each other (micro-segmentation) in order to secure east-west traffic—only authorized communications between systems is allowed.
For VMware IT, our products have been an M&A game changer in driving the speed of integration, ensuring employee productivity, and realizing overall deal synergies.
VMware on VMware blogs are written by IT subject matter experts sharing stories about our digital transformation using VMware products and services in a global production environment. Contact your sales rep or [email protected] to schedule a briefing on this topic. Visit the VMware on VMware microsite and follow us on Twitter.
