Vincent Udoh
M&A IT Integration
I have spent a decade inside the part of an acquisition that decides whether the deal works, and almost nobody measures.
Twenty plus acquisitions, fifteen of them cross border in EMEA. I have sat on both sides of the table: once as one of the people being integrated, and since then as the person responsible for integrating everyone else.
The pattern that holds across all of them is simple. A quiet Day One is not the absence of work. It is what it looks like when every dependency already had a name on it.
Current work
A standard for IT integration readiness, written with the Institute for Mergers, Acquisitions & Alliances.
Every serious layer of a deal has a discipline behind it. Financial diligence has standards and a professional body. Legal has precedent and practice. The IT layer, which increasingly determines whether the deal works, has consultants.
So every deal reinvents it, badly, under time pressure, and the learning does not compound anywhere. This is an attempt to fix that, written by operators rather than by the people selling the remedy.
Track
- 2023 →DFDS. Lead Senior Project Manager, IT infrastructure integrations and M&A. Cross border carve outs and acquisitions across Europe and North Africa, from the Nordics to Turkey, Spain and Morocco.
- 2017 – 2023Amazon. Technical programme manager across corporate infrastructure deployment and IT services integrations, covering fifteen plus global M&A programmes.
- 2013 – 2019Souq.com, Dubai. IT support through to regional service delivery across six countries. Acquired by Amazon in 2017, which I lived from the inside of the company being bought.
- EducationMSc Information Technology Management, University of Wollongong Dubai, with Distinction.
Elsewhere
I write about integration readiness, value leakage and what actually breaks in month four. Most of it goes out on LinkedIn.