Situation
M&A technology integration
A deal closes and both sides still run on two of everything. Two directories, two sets of domains, two mail platforms, two application estates, and two versions of the same job done different ways.
The order in which that gets undone is most of the engagement, and the order is constrained by a date agreed during the negotiation rather than by the technology.
What an integration contains depends on the deal. There is no standard integration here and no program to buy — the work is scoped to what the transaction actually produced. What follows is how the sequencing is thought about, so you can tell whether it matches the one in front of you.
Where this usually starts
Three moments, and they are not the same engagement.
- In diligence
- The question is what you are buying, technically. How many tenants and directories. What the licensing actually costs once the deal closes. What is still running on-premises, and which systems will not move easily. Access is limited and the answers are partial — that is a constraint on the work rather than a reason to skip it.
- At close
- Day one is an access problem. Who can email whom, who can see a calendar, who can open a document, and which of those people expected to be able to on the first morning.
- After close
- The consolidation window is usually already set, and the estate is one organization's problem whether or not it is yet one environment.
A carve-out runs the same machinery backwards — one estate becoming two, on a clock set by a transitional services agreement rather than by an integration plan. Divestitures and tenant separation
What has to become one
- Identity
- Two directories holding some of the same people, accounts that correspond and accounts that only appear to, and service accounts tied to systems that are not moving. Everything below depends on which side becomes the source of truth.
- Domains
- Both organizations arrive with their own, and each can be verified in a single tenant at a time. Which domains survive the merge, and which addresses people keep, is decided rather than inherited.
- Mail flow
- Both sides stay live for a period — routing between them, and free/busy so people can still book each other while some have moved and some have not.
- Applications and integrations
- Everything authenticating against the directory that is going away, including the line-of-business system nobody has needed to touch in years.
- Endpoints
- Devices do not follow the mailbox. Enrollment, compliance policies and recovery keys are their own estate with their own order of operations.
- The parts that are not Microsoft
- Most acquisitions arrive with an ERP, a finance system, a CRM and at least one platform nobody expected. Sunrise's depth is the Microsoft estate — where an integration reaches past it, that is said rather than absorbed.
The deadline is set by the transaction
Deal terms commonly require the environments to be consolidated within a window of close, and a transitional services agreement puts a hard end date on whatever the seller is still running.
Neither date is derived from the technology. They are commitments made while the deal was being negotiated, and the sequence has to fit inside them or the sequence changes.
What that changes in practice is the order of operations rather than the amount of work. What has to be finished before the date, what can be staged after it, and which dependencies mean one step cannot move without moving three others.
What can be established before close
The estate can be assessed while the deal is still being negotiated, rather than discovered in the first week of ownership. That is available to almost nobody after the fact.
Even with limited access, several things can be established. Tenant and directory counts. The licensing position and what it will cost once the deal completes. Domain ownership and where the DNS actually lives. The on-premises footprint, and which systems will resist a move.
What that buys is a sequence and a cost shape before anyone commits to a date — and occasionally a finding that changes what the date should be.
What Sunrise does inside an integration
Not all of this, every time. What an engagement covers is set by the transaction, and by who else is already working on it.
- Discovery and sequencingWhat exists, what depends on what, and what order the work has to happen in.
- Tenant consolidationThe migration itself, in waves, against a stated cutover window.
- IdentityThe directory model that survives the merge, and how it gets built in the target.
- Security postureWhat the acquired environment brings with it, assessed against a published baseline.
- EndpointsRe-enrollment against the target, in the right order relative to identity.
- Integration workThe applications that have to keep authenticating, and keep talking to each other.
Frequently there is an incumbent IT provider on one side or both, and the specialist work is scoped around them rather than through them.
How this usually starts
Most of these begin with an assessment rather than a proposal, because the sequence cannot be written before the estate is known.