Wednesday April 20, 2022

What are the secrets to a successful merger or acquisition? In this series of blog posts, we explore some key themes.

For organizations that aspire to a successful merger or acquisition, a collaboration automation and integration strategy must be at the top of your ‘to do’ list. If staff from both sides of the organization are not quickly given the tools they need to interconnect, collaborate, and start being productive together, the impact will be damaging.

We have written previously on how collaboration tools can positively and negatively affect employees; first in terms of their productivity and second in terms of their experience. Putting the employee at the center of the merger and acquisition (M&A) plan will ensure success.

The importance of user experience

For both sides of an organization to remain productive – and to keep employees happy – the user experience must be seamless.

According to Dispatch, technology is crucial for keeping teams connected and productive. But every team has its own preferences. The average workplace uses an average of 3.3 different chat apps. With this in mind, when two organizations merge, there are three possible collaboration scenario options available:

• If both companies have the same technology, quickly merge the two collaboration platforms into one, putting a single dial plan across both organizations
• If the companies deploy different collaboration tools, migrate one set of employees over to the other company’s collaboration platform as soon as possible
• Take the opportunity to migrate both organizations onto a brand new platform, to optimize and upgrade the experience for everyone

Whichever option you choose, automated migration technology must be at the heart of your transformation.

Migration automation technology

VOSS offers highly agile UC migration automation which ensures a highly efficient and seamless transformation experience, regardless of whether you choose option 1, 2 or 3. And, the fact that VOSS has years of experience in automating the migration and on-boarding of huge volumes of users, devices and services, will give you peace of mind that your transformation journey is in safe hands.

It’s important to note that while your collaboration integration strategy must be a priority, it’s also absolutely essential for you to manage the timescale of the transformation to suit your goals. With VOSS, you are in complete control of the timeline; you decide how fast you want the migration project to go.

VOSS Migrate incorporates a highly sophisticated migration engine and uses a revolutionary methodology to discover, extract, transform, validate and load large volumes of users, devices and collaboration services:

• In scenario 1, VOSS enables both organizations to normalize and optimize their collaboration data, before merging the collaboration platforms into one, and rolling out a single dial plan across the entire new organization
• In scenario 2, VOSS discovers, extracts and transforms the collaboration data from company B and automates the migration of that data onto the collaboration platform of company A
• In scenario 3, VOSS discovers, extracts and transforms the collaboration data from both organizations, allows for optimization, improvement and normalization, then automates the load of the data onto a brand new platform

The value of migration automation

No matter which scenario is chosen, by using VOSS Migrate you will benefit from our tried and tested high-speed automated approach, including repeatable rules, logging of all actions, and rollback capability – with migrations undertaken in flexible batch sizes to suit you.

VOSS Migrate has the capability to import data from various sources and automatically merge it as required. This can then be transformed and reviewed prior to any provisioning taking place.

Be mindful of the fact that while your organization may choose to merge the collaboration experience quite quickly, other IT functions and operations tools may be slower to integrate. The two sides of the business may wish to keep a degree of autonomy in the short term. This will lead to an added layer of complexity, and this is where VOSS Automate could help.

VOSS Automate is the world’s most advanced automation management platform, offering a single point of administration and integration for the digital workplace ecosystem. This is perfect for organizations going through a merger or acquisition. VOSS Automate provides the automation and orchestration that will solve many integration challenges which will drive success and adoption, and greatly reduce delivery costs.

Actionable intelligence is key

VOSS Insights will give the merged companies actionable intelligence into employee collaboration and performance. It will empower you to optimize the new business and operational performance, increase user adoption, and also save both time and money. It will enable you to visualize and actively manage the performance and quality of your collaboration suite. And, by integrating seamlessly with business applications from both organizations, you will be able to resolve problems faster, make better and more informed decisions, and improve service delivery.

So, if you are planning for a merger or acquisition, make sure you put your collaboration strategy at the top of your list, to ensure success. To find out more about how VOSS can help with your M&A activity, please get in touch.