Avanade Microsoft 365 Mergers, Acquisitions & Divestitures FY24

With increasing deal size, manageability of M&A transactions becomes even more important requiring innovative tools and methodology

Trend towards increasing deal sizes puts additional pressure on IT as the main driver of M&A costs and synergy potential.

The CIO becomes a strategic partner in identifying acquisition opportunities and overseeing the planning and preparation of the M&A deal to spot potential obstacles & ensure optimal leveraging the synergy potential

Overall, the role of IT will shift from being an inhibitor to change towards becoming a source of value creation in the deal. Increasing systemic flexibility (e.g. IT Architecture) will allow companies to follow additional opportunities

Key environmental changes combined with enabling technologies reveal dramatic opportunities for increasing M&A activity

The Top 7 Challenges for IT with M&A can be summarised as follows:

1. Aggressive timelines for cutover : Contractual commitments may require a rapid transition

2. Global regulatory complexity : Regulations governing each entity may differ in each affected state and country.

3. Loss of resources : Resources with key skills and institutional knowledge will leave the company before and during transition

4. Daily operations and user impact : Despite M&A disruption, a focus on service delivery can be lost

5. Juggling transformation : M&A creates an opportunity for transformation, but this adds complexity to the program

6. Change management and communications : Managing change is key for both IT and business buy-in and success. Branding is a specific challenge

7. Blackout period : The M&A blackout period will create challenges for the program schedule

Avanade's Microsoft 365 M&A Solution mitigates all of these risks.