A repeatable technology playbook across six acquisitions

Context

Growth by acquisition puts the CIO on a clock: every day a target runs on its own stack is a day of duplicated cost, security exposure, and confused employees. The first integration is always bespoke. The question is whether the second one has to be.

Approach

Diligence became a fixed checklist covering security posture, licensing, data ownership, key-person risk, and cost takeout, delivered to the deal team before signing rather than after.

Integration followed a standard sequence: identity and email on day one, security tooling and endpoint coverage in the first weeks, then core systems on the enterprise platform. [verify: typical integration duration, first deal versus sixth]

Each deal fed its lessons back into the playbook, so the sixth integration was measurably faster and cheaper than the first. [verify: a concrete number if available]