Optimize your M&A process with the Boomi M&A accelerator
Take the pain out of your M&A integrations with the iPaaS Boomi M&A accelerator.
You’ll often hear mergers and acquisitions (M&A) professionals say, “Acquisitions are fun, integrations are hell.” Bringing two organizations together presents numerous challenges, including mismatched cultures, customers, products, and go-to-market models. Perhaps one of the greatest challenges to unlocking revenue and cost synergies is joining the two companies’ technology systems, so that the acquired company’s employees can collaborate with their new colleagues.
Systems connection vs. systems integration
Integrating the acquired company’s systems into the acquiring organization is lengthy and expensive. It’s not unusual for go-to-market system integration to take more than 6 months and to cost millions of dollars. Boomi, an integration platform as a service (IPaaS) solution, enables the systems of the companies to connect so that the teams within the two organizations can collaborate seamlessly. The Boomi M&A accelerator is not about actual system integration — it’s about connection.
“The accelerator enables the automation of data flow between two systems — it’s like providing a layer of data rationalization across discreet data sets,” says Slalom Delivery Director Shane Fisher.
And, with the average enterprise organization using 1100 cloud applications, there’s a lot of data that needs to be managed. The product includes connectors for many common applications — whether they’re cloud native, on-prem, or running on a hybrid architecture. And, they work right off the shelf, with everything from old legacy systems, such as IBM mainframe computers, to leading-edge apps.
The devil is in the details. Teams often exceed 100 individuals, over an 8-month plus timeframe — from IT and business functions — to enable the go-to-market motion of an acquired company in the acquiring company’s system. All the while, marketing, sales and partner channel teams have to share spreadsheets to create campaigns, sell together, and for account planning. It can be a frustrating experience for employees, partners, and customers.
Leaders in acquiring companies appreciate the plug-and-play aspect of the accelerator because they can focus on quickly bringing people from the acquired company into an integrated team, and eliminate frustrating, manual workflows between the organizations.
Acquisitions can be very disruptive to an organization’s IT roadmap and project portfolio. Work has to get re-prioritized overnight and teams are pulled out of in-flight initiatives to work on the integration of the acquired company’s systems. Boomi allows to postpone this work to when it makes sense from a system-architecture roadmap point of view because it connects systems and enables workflow automation without system integration.
Avoid common integration pitfalls
Paying attention to customer relationships is critical during an integration. Having two marketing and sales teams communicate to a shared customer without a collaboration platform and automation almost guarantees missteps.
For example, how do two companies ensure that their lead-generation efforts aren’t duplicated? Here’s a scenario: an acquiring company is working with a client on a big proposal — and they’re in the middle of closing the deal. Then, the client who’s being courted gets an email that reads: “As a new customer, we’d like to show you our full product suite.” The client thinks, “I’ve been working with you for years and we’ve got a $3 million proposal in the works!” The email creates a bad customer experience and makes the acquiring company look inept.
In this instance, Boomi would connect the data between the two companies, so that everyone on the marketing and sales teams get a unified view of all the contacts. An email like that would never be sent.
Eliminate ambiguity
Data governance is another crucial aspect of M&As. The acquiring company may have a different data governance model than the acquired company, or one that’s not well-defined. Maybe the acquiring company doesn’t have a tight definition of a customer. Is a contact who hasn’t bought for three years still a customer — or a prospect? And, the sales team might have a different opinion than the marketing team. Such instances are complicated and messy.
Slalom works to define the data governance model for the acquiring company in advance, and implements the Boomi solution. Those two things happen concurrently — and it speeds organic growth for the acquired company. There’s also regulatory impact with M&As that the integration team needs to examine. If the smaller, acquired company lacks maturity in this arena, data governance would be incredibly important.
Bring it all together
Think differently about how to approach your next acquisition. Connect meaningful data without integrating or migrating systems. Slalom can help you develop technical integration strategies before your actual M&As occur — contact Chris von Bogdandy at chris.vonbogdanday@slalom.com or Shane Fisher at shane.fisher@slalom.com.
Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology and business transformation. Learn more and reach out today.
