Technology Perspectives

Technology platforms for

business integration
Seeking new paths to growth
Successful businesses constantly seek growth, and they follow many different paths to growth over time. In recent
years, many companies have chosen to grow through acquisition due to market conditions, industry pressure, or
simply because suitable opportunities arose.
While the purpose of an acquisition may be to support growth, the goals of an acquisition are only achievable by
successfully combining the operations and finances of the two entities. That process begins by integrating the IT
infrastructure of the acquired company. Unfortunately, many business software products, especially ERP platforms,
rely on outdated architecture that impedes the successful integration of newly acquired companies. That’s why it’s
essential for companies to consider the readiness of their IT infrastructure as they consider the possibility of
acquiring or being acquired by another company.
The challenge of integration
Sometimes companies pursue acquisitions for
strategic reasons, and other times because of unique
combinations of trends, such as the current expansion
in the US economy or a need to expand to new
geographies. In nearly all cases, though, the value of
an acquisition results from successfully combining the
businesses financially and operationally. Integrating
the participating companies’ IT systems is often the
prerequisite to a successful merger, but that task can
be more complex than it sounds. In addition to having
to reconcile myriad details with respect to accounting
categories and financial structures, there’s an inherent
time pressure that comes with the need to keep both
businesses operating while you perform the
equivalent of a “brain transplant” involving both firms’
most critical intelligence.
Many widely-used enterprise-grade ERP and financial
systems still rely on technologies and architectures
that prevailed in the Y2K era—monolithic, proprietary
architectures that weren’t built with an eye toward
integration or to accommodate a multi-vendor IT
environment. As a result, the typical connection routes
between applications of that era depend on either
cumbersome, point-to-point, hard-coded integrations
or laborious extract-transform-load (ETL) processes.
Hard-coded integrations can take a long time to
implement, and they break when either system is
upgraded. Using ETL to import and export data
between systems tends to be slow and error-prone.
How postmodern
ERP systems offer
a new approach
As new technologies have emerged, modern
business software architectures now make it possible
for companies to assemble an IT platform that
streamlines the process of integrating many different
solutions to boost business flexibility and give firms
more choices about how they run their businesses.
The ability to efficiently incorporate a newly acquired
business is only one of the benefits of this trend.
Some experts use the term “postmodern ERP” to
describe the current generation of business solutions
that are built around up-to-date cloud technologies to
create loosely coupled platforms that can easily
integrate best-of-breed solutions to solve specific
business problems.
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Technology Perspectives 2
It’s now incumbent on business leaders to examine Seeing the benefits
their technology choices to be sure that their IT
infrastructure incorporates a business integration
of integration
platform with several key characteristics: This approach gives a business significant
■ Easy exchange of open source business improvements in agility and consistency. For example,
documents—Rather than constrain the business to it allows companies to define their corporate
the protocols of a single vendor, be sure that accounting framework (CAF) to improve adherence to
technology is as widely compatible as possible corporate, local, and government standards, and
with other vendors’ solutions. provides that ability to merge or split general leger
transactions to allow proper allocations to cost centers
■ Service-oriented delivery—A business integration
and leads to more accurate, up-to-date information for
platform delivered as a service makes it much
reporting and analysis.
easier to disseminate the definition and
harmonization of business rules across many As a result, it becomes vastly simpler to apply
different kinds of systems, so that you can maintain consistent business rules across all subsidiaries and
consistency across the enterprise. establish a basis for a well-orchestrated corporation
with clear strategic focus. With a modern integration
■ Separation between data structures and
platform, businesses position themselves for better
business rules—By keeping these issues separate,
performance in the long run, while making it simpler to
a business retains the flexibility, standardization,
execute acquisitions that close smoothly and deliver
and speed necessary to integrate different
their intended benefits.
business units, while maintaining full visibility across
the enterprise.
With a responsive, fully-integrated IT platform, leaders
of merged businesses gain the ability to apply
consistent financial governance across the enterprise.
It also gives financial officers, controllers, and business
unit managers clear, consistent information that can
help accelerate the close process and deliver reliable
information for reporting or decision-making.

Technology Perspectives 3
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