Mergers, acquisitions, and old hardware

“I always said that mega-mergers were for megalomaniacs.”
—David Ogilvy

M&A (merger and acquisition) activity never stops. Whether the economy is humming along or tanking, M&A deals continue at one pace or another.

"Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway."
—Warren Buffet

There are several reasons why M&A activity will continue to grow. In 2024 Mid-Year Outlook: Global M&A Industry Trends, Brian Levy, Global Deals Industries Leader at PwC, states that private equity firms’ portfolios are ripe for sale, with thousands of portfolio companies on the books for 4 or more years (typically the period of time that the PE likes to exit). Companies are also looking to inorganic growth to balance the lackluster organic growth that many are experiencing.

As I described in an earlier blog post, I’ve been part of some ugly product rationalizations driven by an acquisition (I was part of the acquiring company). This one was especially interesting because the acquired company behaved as if they were the acquiring company. Another fun thing to be addressed, after the deal closes, is determining what to do with all of the acquired company’s old hardware. Even more importantly, what to do with the data residing on that hardware? Remember storage and database consolidation?

Why should C-suite executives care about whether the integration is easy or difficult? It’s simple because the more resources that are poured into integrating the companies the more the integration becomes a drag on the value of the deal. Gartner addresses integration challenges, with respect to Public Cloud and SaaS, in “Public Cloud Simplifies M&A Integration and Separation”, July 2024. While this piece is specific to Public Cloud and SaaS, it could easily apply to anything that simplifies IT integration in M&A activity.

If you’ve got NetApp supporting your SAN (if you don’t, you’re about to find out why you should), you’ve got an “easy button” called Foreign LUN Import. FLI is a feature built into NetApp^® ONTAP^® that enables users to import data from foreign array LUNs to NetApp LUNs in a simple and efficient manner. FLI is a pretty nice easy button because it’s built into ONTAP and doesn’t require additional licensing, doesn’t need additional hardware for data migration, and supports a variety of migration types and third-party storage platforms. NetApp’s own Oracle expert, Jeffrey Steiner, shows you how easily this all works in a 31-minute video.

M&A deals are growing in number for the reasons just mentioned. Whether your company is the acquired or the acquirer, you’ll need to move critical assets—your databases—to other storage platforms. Do yourself a favor and move them to NetApp storage.

To help you fuel innovation, stay competitive, and protect and secure your data, find out what else NetApp can do for your databases. If you’re more technically inclined, you’ll want to peruse the assets for Oracle, SQL Server, and more here. For technical assets on SAP, go here.