Easing the Transition
Whether an acquisition winds up painful for the customer or proves beneficial depends on many factors. In general, it's easier for a vendor to acquire a smaller company than a more substantial vendor with a lot of employees and widespread distribution, says Jon Oltsik, senior analyst at market-research firm Enterprise Strategy Group. He cites Symantec and Cisco as having perfected the way to buy and integrate smaller companies.
Richard Palmer, vice president and general manager of Cisco's security technology group, says the company's strategy--with the exception of its recent purchase of set-top box maker Scientific Atlanta--is to buy relatively small companies with established products in the market that can be quickly integrated into Cisco's offerings.
"We try to pick companies that we don't have to dramatically change their strategy and technology road- map," he says.
Cisco has developed a system for preparing its employees and channel partners to s...
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upport products that come into the company's portfolio via an acquisition. "Since we've done quite a bit of acquisitions, we have a fairly well established set of things that need to be done," Palmer says.
Symantec has a team dedicated to integration of its acquired companies and a framework to analyze the acquired company's customer base, including routes to market, customer support requirements and customer overlap, according to James Socas, senior vice president of corporate development at Symantec.
"Our goal is to have continuity in customer support and to work in partnership with our acquired customers and the acquired sales team to make the transition smooth," he says.
Key for Symantec in offering integrated solutions is to retain the people who built the companies it acquires--more than 60 percent of Symantec employees have joined the company through acquisitions. This focus allows the company to retain best-of-breed expertise within a broader corporate offering, Socas says.
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