Thursday, November 15, 2018

Acquisition based companies - Rip, strip, replace vs integrate?

Curious what other companies mind sets are about what to do with an acquisition's networking equipment(and general other IT equipment for that matter) when an acquisition comes along.

I just left a healthcare company that was heavily acquisition based, went from 80 to 500 remote offices during my time there. Most of our acquisitions were large, 30-50 offices and others 100+.. Normally we would try to integrate due to the size it just wasn't feasible to replace 50 offices router/switches or PCs. We'd build a tunnel back and reimage the machines, have to learn a new platform in the process maybe..

Well anyways, my new company, also an acquisition based healthcare company, just absolutely refuses to integrate any tech that isn't their standard(cisco) and replaces every PC. I've been on a few meetings already when they're discussing an acquisition and the cost for replacing all their gear is discussed with ops guys and theres gasps and eye rolls when IT are answering their questions.

I've suggested to my team integration strategies and that I even have experience with some of the techs we run across but just get shut down, this is the way we do it, replace everything or they don't touch our network.

I'm all for standardization but I see plans to just dump even recently refreshed equipment just based on the standardization merit alone.



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