When is a Rapid Assessment the Right Approach to M&A Technology Due Diligence?

When is a Rapid Assessment the Right Approach to M&A Technology Due Diligence?

Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring businesses to grow their competitive positions. Every aspect of the business—from customer relationships to financials to hiring—is reviewed. Insights into the technologies and security that the target company employs and whether they will integrate well with those of your own company help you determine potential risks and costs involved in moving forward with the acquisition.

In today’s world where IT issues and security breaches are becoming more common, astute executives are scrutinizing potential IT risks and security threats prior to getting too far into the process of closing a merger or acquisition.  By focusing on the highest priority factors, a rapid assessment provides the details of how a company is run technically, what unknowns might affect product or technical integration success, and how that company is protected from a cybersecurity and privacy perspective.

If you’re in the early stages of determining a possible acquisition or comparing multiple potential acquisition targets and are working under a time or budget crunch, a rapid technology assessment can be completed quickly and cost effectively.

The Key to a High-Quality Rapid Assessment

The quality of your M&A assessment is determined by the consulting partner you choose. It’s important to select a partner that has deep hands-on experience in enterprise architecture, large scale systems integration and cloud migrations to inform your goals and objectives. It is critical to understand what questions to ask and how those questions apply to your situation.

When you complete the acquisition, will you integrate the acquired company into your technical environment or let them run on their own?  Do you plan to keep any of their systems or migrate them all to yours?  If you are going to use any of their systems, can they scale to meet your needs?  Are any of them out of date or not supported anymore?  What shape is their data in, and does it need to be cleaned and rationalized?  Does their security architecture meet your regulatory needs?

During the rapid assessment process, our M&A technical due diligence team will collect information on security, data, applications, and underlying technology infrastructure to answer these questions and more. We will also work with you to understand which applications and assets you will need after the acquisition and determine a roadmap for future integrations. These details will provide you with critical information on the cost to integrate with your environment.

With mergers and acquisitions, knowledge is power—Primitive Logic has over thirty years of experience with enterprise architecture, large-scale systems analysis and integration, and more recently large platform cloud migration and integration. Are you ready to explore whether a rapid assessment is right for your M&A technical due diligence process? Contact us today to arrange for a personalized consultation.

Follow Jill Reber on Twitter at @PrimitiveCEO.

Jill Reber, February 2017