How 4it Helps Clients Streamline And Optimize Their Merger and Acquisition Projects
In the emerging mid-market space, mergers and acquisitions that involve our clients have become an expected and engaging part of the mission at 4it. A key example of this is when we helped a South Florida client migrate a data center, call center, and hundreds of sales locations in a matter of months.
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Mergers & Acquisitions Require Careful Planning And Thoughtful Execution
Anyone who’s been through a merger or acquisition knows how complicated and error-prone the process can be. As two organizations become one, data continuity and integrity can be difficult to maintain. Without the right planning, technology standards can quickly fall.
However, our knowledge and strategy can help clients to address many of the most prevalent issues that crop up in a merger or acquisition. Our support helps to streamline each stage of the process, ensuring minimal errors.
M&A initiatives allow the 4it team to put our extensive project management and engineering skills to use. We evaluate the client’s needs, carefully strategize the process, and carry it out within the proposed time frame. This type of work goes beyond the role of a standard IT company, exemplifying the way we partner with our clients to help them seamlessly grow their businesses.
That’s precisely what we did with one of our South Florida clients…
This Client Needed To Transition Their Acquired IT Assets During Daily 4-Hour Windows In Under 3 Months…
This client had a deal to purchase a division of Travelocity. This deal included the following IT assets:
- A small datacenter installation in Texas
- A 120-user call center in Las Vegas
- 25 company-owned kiosk sales locations in Las Vegas hotels
- More than 100 third-party sales locations
A key requirement in the agreement was that all of the above infrastructure needed to be transitioned off of Travelocity’s systems within 90 days of the sale. This would mean replacing the firewall and switching infrastructure in the Texas datacenter, moving the AS/400 and web server cluster to a new cage, migrating the call-center workstations to a new Microsoft Active Directory, and replacing the call-center phone system.
If that wasn’t complicated enough, these systems were in use from 7:00 AM – 3:00 AM every day. That meant we would only have a 4-hour service window to complete testing and carry out a very challenging cutover.
4it Expertly Planned And Executed This Client’s Migration
Given the extent of the IT infrastructure involved and the highly limited timeframe, this project required extensive planning, pre-site setup, network engineering, coordination with existing technical staff from both organizations, hardware procurement, and engineering labor for testing and cutover.
Our staff members coordinated in three different states with the client’s and Travelocity’s teams, ensuring that every IT asset was accounted for. We were careful to only work within those 4-hour service windows, and properly schedule the project to guarantee completion within 90-days of the deal.
After a highly intensive 8 weeks of planning and testing, in the end, we were able to cut over the entire call center onto completely new infrastructure within the 4-hour service window. Doing so required the shutdown of the datacenter equipment, disconnection, and relocation of the AS/400 and cluster hardware, re-racking of all that equipment in a new cage, and spinning it all back up before 7:00 AM.
Furthermore, we were also responsible for post-move technical support for the call center. Our team was on hand to ensure the client’s staff could get in touch with support requests as needed, allowing them to hit the ground running on their first day in the new location.
4it Seamlessly Maintained This Client’s IT Infrastructure During Their Acquisition
Thankfully, the move went very smoothly, and the customer was thrilled with the results.
While the client had initially hired some new internal technical staff to take over managing all this new infrastructure, it wasn’t long before they called us again. Numerous service outages and staffing challenges had caused extensive downtime and other issues.
Based on their experience working with us during the acquisition, this client knew they could rely on 4it. They hired us to permanently manage all of their corporate IT infrastructure and became our largest customer for many years.
