How to Simplify the IT Component of an M&A Integration

By Scott McDonald

The global mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market soared to an all-time peak in 2021.[1] While activity has slowed slightly in 2022, deal volumes are still at healthy, pre-pandemic levels — even with economic uncertainty looming amidst high inflation and rising interest rates.[2]

M&A is an effective strategy to achieve rapid growth and value creation — and it’s not just for the big players. Small and Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs) can also successfully leverage M&A to realize economies of scale, diversify products and services, expand into new geographies, obtain intellectual property, and reduce competition.

While M&A can be a smart business strategy, doubling or tripling the size of your company virtually overnight presents some formidable challenges. To minimize business disruption, it’s important to bring the two companies together as quickly and seamlessly as possible. By working with a cloud IT provider with proven experience in SMB M&As, you can keep your business running smoothly and efficiently from an IT perspective while you focus on other areas of integration management.

Infinitely Virtual (IV) has helped numerous SMB customers through successful M&A integrations — simply and cost-effectively — ensuring continuous application availability, absolute data protection, and high end-user productivity. We can work with your organization to determine the best IT integration strategy and ensure a smooth transition for all your people — and your customers.

Count on the cloud

If you’re acquiring or merging with another business, hosting and managing your critical business applications in-house could become a serious hindrance. As you add more users, and potentially more applications, chances are you’ll need to purchase new servers and other equipment to expand your existing IT infrastructure. Given current supply chain issues, you could face long waits to get the gear you require — and be forced to pay top dollar for it. In addition, your in-house IT professional or contract IT consultant will be under tremendous pressure to get all this done in a timely manner while supporting a larger end-user base.

Cloud hosting with IV makes the IT integration process infinitely easier. Leveraging our Enterprise Virtualization Environment™, IV can expand your IT infrastructure, adding applications and users, with the push of a button — all for an affordable, predictable monthly fee. Plus, we’ll ensure that your cloud environment is compliance-enabled and meets the security requirements of the newly formed organization.

Flexibility for moving forward

IV can provide solutions for any acquisition scenario. Whether you want to roll the acquired company into your existing IT stack, run both IT stacks independently, or do something in between, IV has you covered. For example, we can easily:

  • Transition the acquired company into your application stack in the IV cloud infrastructure. We’ll migrate their data, add their users, set up active directories, and even manage and secure their onsite devices.
  • Let the acquired company keep their application stack and run those systems parallel to your current application stack. IV can set up an additional infrastructure tied to your file server in our cloud environment. We can even control which users have access to which applications.
  • Add new application technology to your IV infrastructure to support the acquisition business strategy and make it available to appropriate users within the combined organization.

These seamless approaches ensure that you won’t interrupt workflows for any employees — no matter which of the two companies they work for. At the same time, everyone benefits from IV’s industry-leading application availability, performance, security, and support, helping you achieve greater value and competitive advantage from your M&A deal. And if the deal positions you for organic growth, IV offers unlimited scalability to ensure your cloud infrastructure continues to meet your evolving needs.

Trust the SMB experts

If your SMB is pursuing an M&A deal, IV can help. Whether you’re merging with or acquiring another business, we can recommend the best approach to successfully integrate your IT systems in our best-in-class cloud platform for a seamless transition that minimizes business disruption and maximizes value. Contact us today or visit www.infinitelyvirtual.com to learn more.