Large acquisitions are never easy. But when it involves the complex world of equities, the level of pain can be excruciating. Not only are the respective companies’ financial applications complex and incompatible, there’s a myriad regulations to adhere to. Meanwhile, both organizations just want to get to work, without the distraction of making these IT systems work together and compliant.
Recently, investment back, CIMB Group, bought the equities business from the Royal Bank of Scotland, a bank in the process of paying back the bailout funds given to it during the 2008 banking crisis.
Fortunately for CIMB, there was an IT solutions concern available with experience in such matters – Indicium Technology Group, which was contracted to handle IT for the newly enlarged bank.
While CIMP operates throughout Southeast Asia, the IT outsourcing deal is aimed at Australia.
The merger was the impetus behind the outsourcing, said Manish Goklaney, director of Indicium Technology Group, as it led CIMB to look for “local data center colocation provider to house their Australian production, UAT and disaster recovery infrastructures.”
Indicium isn’t just smoothing over the wrinkles from the merger; it is taking over a large swath of CIMB’s IT operations. “Indicium was initially contracted to fulfill the data center brief only, however, after seamless integration and a high quality design solution for the data center co location, Indicium was contracted for the implementation and ongoing managed services which was originally expected to go to a high profile, global managed services provider,” Goklaney explained.
Fast Transition
CIMB wasn’t looking to drag its feet on the transition. Fortunately, Indicium moved quickly. “Delivering to a very aggressive 20 week schedule, the fluid scope saw the implementation of colocation, connectivity and infrastructure services to meet the CIMB’s requirement. This has helped CIMB to make a serious play in the Australian markets with confidence,” Goklaney said.
The Secret of Success
Many mergers fail, not just due to bad management, changing markets or an ill fit, but because the pair fails at integration. Not only must marketing and branding be taken care of, and corporate cultures aligned, but the IT system must be knitted together seamlessly and workflows intelligently established.
In a white paper, the Global Consulting Partnership argued that the corporate culture aspect is the most important factor. But blending corporate cultures requires close communication and collaboration, items that IT systems such as e-mail, IM, unified communications and document sharing enable.
A big job for any integrator is making sure all these applications work across the entire merged organization, allowing the two cultures to being merging into one.
Edited by
Braden Becker
