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Avoiding Complexity in Mergers and Acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) bring numerous challenges across all departments. But IT teams are often charged with providing the underlying infrastructure that will allow the organizations to operate successfully under a new configuration. This is a big ask and typically occurs with little warning, and regardless of how much ongoing work exists in the day job.

There are plenty of factors that can further complicate this scenario, including when the company is acquired or merged is in a different country with unique reporting and regulatory requirements. While part of an important growth strategy for the organization, these moves can put tremendous pressure on already taxed IT staff.

Additionally, an outdated IT infrastructure may not easily accommodate the planned integration. If it is not designed to handle this scenario, that’s when you risk creating organizational silos of data and an extended period to reach your goals. If IT needs to jump through various hoops to provide comprehensive reporting and visibility into the new partnership, the opportunities for errors increase, valuable ROI is lost, and the goals of the M&A activity may be missed.

By moving from on-premises enterprise infrastructure to the cloud, organizations can avoid a potentially devastating business impact while simultaneously optimizing your IT workforce efforts. Since cloud solutions are designed to be scalable, flexible, secure, and manage variable workloads, they are ideally suited for M&A activities.

Liberty Steel UK was part of an acquisition by Liberty House Group that deployed CloudSuite Industrial Enterprise in both the UK and China, supporting over 1700 employees in those locations. One of the key benefits identified by Liberty was the offsite deployment of the cloud solution, which freed their IT staff to focus on the strategic initiatives of their growing company.

Original Article provided by Infor.

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How to Avoid Disruption From Loss of Technical Expertise

Let’s continue on the importance of business continuity by recognizing how the loss of technical expertise can have a potentially damaging impact on organizations with legacy IT applications.

Over time, each organization builds an enterprise ecosystem that uniquely addresses its needs. This is the natural progression of enterprise business solutions as technology and tools advance. The challenge emerges when only a handful of people understand how to manage and maintain that system successfully and perhaps only one individual truly understands the complete picture. As these enterprise solutions and corresponding data are the very core of the business, any scenario that puts it at risk is dangerous.

For many organizations, the realization that your go-to people, those who truly understand all the nuances in your enterprise ecosystem, are no longer there comes too late. Whether this loss comes through resignation, retirement, health issues, or merger and acquisition, you will need to find replacements. How can your organization ensure the continuity of day-to-day operations with the potential loss of technical expertise?

One of the ways to mitigate this risk is to accelerate cloud migration. With a shift to the cloud, your organization is supported by solutions that are continuously updated, and by investment in IT personnel that would be difficult for some of the largest organizations to match. A small army is dedicated to monitoring your organization’s applications and data to ensure they are optimized and protected.

A recent CIO tech priorities survey by IDG showed that “despite increased budgets and interest in new technologies that can positively impact business in the future, organizations still face familiar challenges to adoption. The top challenges that IT leaders encounter are lack of sufficient budget (48%), lack of staff (46%), and lack of skill sets (42%).” By shifting the responsibility of managing and maintaining your critical IT solutions over to a cloud provider with modern applications, your organization can create an opportunity to reset expectations and priorities for your IT staff.

Babbitt Chainwheels is a manufacturer and distributor who relied on a legacy ERP for years. While the organization faced a number of business challenges, one urgent situation was the impending retirement of its IT staff. To protect and grow their business, they invested in a cloud solution that would relieve much of that burden.

Original Article provided by Infor.

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Infor Multi-tenant Cloud Customer Bill of Rights

Our final discussion in this series is on the importance of operational continuity and scenarios organizations must avoid addresses expanding IT costs. There are countless possible examples to discuss, but we’ll focus on the typical costs and efforts associated with ongoing maintenance and management of on-premises applications.

In addition to the pressure to innovate and integrate new solutions to the enterprise ecosystem, many on-premises implementations are both blessed and cursed with modifications to address unique requirements. These mods, along with regular upgrades and updates, need to be scheduled and managed. IDG reports that the top two priorities for CIOs in 2020 are investments in additional security and analytics. This list not only represents a fraction of day-to-day expectations of current IT staff but also expanding costs to the organization. When comparing the operating expense of a cloud solution to the capital expense of an on-premise solution, there’s a much more persuasive argument for the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with cloud solutions. Organizations that may have wanted to defer on this option in the past may wish to take another look at evaluating your cloud migration options to see if now is the right time to make the move.

According to Constellation Research, one of the ways cloud-based software provides big wins to customers is through the ability to receive rapid innovation at scale. While there’s a knowable direct saving associated with the shift from on-premises to cloud, there are also many additional benefits available on a continual basis as enhancements are automatically delivered.

This series discussed business-damaging scenarios that can be avoided by replacing outdated IT systems with a cloud solution to ensure business continuity. Three of our topics (critical system failure, M&A complexity, and legacy bottlenecks), address fundamental structural challenges inherent in legacy solutions. These challenges can put at risk the organization’s data, its ROI, and its ability to innovate.

Original article written by Infor.

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How to Avoid Expanding IT Costs

Our final discussion in this series is on the importance of operational continuity and scenarios organizations must avoid addresses expanding IT costs. There are countless possible examples to discuss, but we’ll focus on the typical costs and efforts associated with ongoing maintenance and management of on-premises applications.

In addition to the pressure to innovate and integrate new solutions to the enterprise ecosystem, many on-premises implementations are both blessed and cursed with modifications to address unique requirements. These mods, along with regular upgrades and updates, need to be scheduled and managed. IDG reports that the top two priorities for CIOs in 2020 are investments in additional security and analytics. This list not only represents a fraction of day-to-day expectations of current IT staff but also expanding costs to the organization. When comparing the operating expense of a cloud solution to the capital expense of an on-premise solution, there’s a much more persuasive argument for the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with cloud solutions. Organizations that may have wanted to defer on this option in the past may wish to take another look at evaluating your cloud migration options to see if now is the right time to make the move.

According to Constellation Research, one of the ways cloud-based software provides big wins to customers is through the ability to receive rapid innovation at scale. While there’s a knowable direct saving associated with the shift from on-premises to cloud, there are also many additional benefits available on a continual basis as enhancements are automatically delivered.

This series discussed business-damaging scenarios that can be avoided by replacing outdated IT systems with a cloud solution to ensure business continuity. Three of our topics (critical system failure, M&A complexity, and legacy bottlenecks), address fundamental structural challenges inherent in legacy solutions. These challenges can put at risk the organization’s data, its ROI, and its ability to innovate.

Original article written by Infor.

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