Earlier this week, my employer purchased another company in a $1.5 billion deal. The company we purchased is about 10% of our size in workforce and sales revenue. They have 820 employees and $274 million in sales. So, while this is not a merger of equals, it is more than a purchase of a startup. There will be significant communications (networking) issues to deal with.
An interesting side note: merger is one of the testing scenarios in the CCDE Practical Exam. You could be presented with a merger and deal with the network engineering aspects of the merger in the form of test questions. A useful application of training and certification to a real world event.
Being the manager of a Communications Engineering team, I have responsibility for not just the network engineering (WAN and data center), but also IP Telephony, SAN, Network Security, QoS, and the Contact Center. All of these areas will be impacted by this merger/purchase. I have an initial brainstorming meeting with the team this week, but here are some of the issues I've listed already:
And finally, what about the people? Users and their current IT Network Engineers? Are the users demanding or understanding? Are the network engineers experienced? CCIEs? How many are there? Will they transfer over to our company?
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to integrating these two company's networks and communications systems. Over the next several months I'll blog about our experiences, issues, processes, and problems. Should be a great experience!
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Michael Morris is a communications engineering manager at a $3-billion high-tech company. His background is in enterprise WANs working with telcos and developing large-scale routing designs. He has worked on networks at government and corporate organizations, including networks at two Fortune 10 companies. In his current role, he leads a team of 10 engineers responsible for large-scale IT networking projects and architectural standards for data networks, storage area networks, IP telephony, contact centers, and security. Michael is CCIE #11733 and recently became one of the first three Cisco Certified Design Experts (CCDE) ever (#20080002). He has 11 years experience in networking and communications, including four years as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army. He has a bachelor's degree in MIS from the University at Buffalo and is working on his MBA from NC State University. In 2008, he was awarded the Network Professional Association (NPA) Professional Excellence and Innovation Award for his work on network architecture, templates and enterprise MPLS design.
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When i started reading your
When i started reading your blog i wondered who was the "$3-billion high-tech company".Now i finally find out it's the company who bought another company for 1.5B(not naming the companies, but readers should figure out, it's all over the IT news).
I guess your company is happy having one of the few CCDEs on staff. What better person to manage this merger than a CCDE ?
I'm looking forward to your posts here, it will be interesting to see some real-world experiences related to the "IT merger" of two companies.
Merger
I went through the tuff task of converging two networks when the company I worked for was acquired. I learned a lot and continue to learn every day. Great article!!
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