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Rapid Creation of New Standalone Infrastructure

Making Mergers & Acquisitions Work

Helping our Private Equity clients achieve value in their portfolio.

ViTL is a boutique IT services firm with big firm pedigrees. We are obsessively focused on fully supporting the needs of Private Equity; from diligence through planning and separation/integration.

We understand the economics of “quickly” and provide premium support for decision making. We are experts at identifying risk impact and creating roadmaps that include issues and barriers. We are able to embed with portfolio companies to ensure seamless transitions and integration.

Proof of Performance

Blackstone recently engaged ViTL to manage a Carve Out from Raytheon, with the goal of creating a new standalone company inclusive of more than 700 employees and 100 applications during a 12 month period. This was a $12m greenfield network and infrastructure project.

Case study: From IT Divestiture to Greenfield Network / Infrastructure Buildout

Client needed to quickly establish and operationalize a new full stack network and infrastructure, to service and support enterprise manufacturing and all business operations, as the high-precision optics manufacturing unit of a large defense contractor that was required by the DOJ to divest the business and establish a new company. 

ViTL was contracted to architect the network, lead the infrastructure deployment, plan the IT roadmap and operationalize the new network infrastructure.

Client Challenge

    • Acquisition: Client was purchased by a large private equity firm with the intention of establishing it as a new, stand-alone company.
    • Impending Technical Severance: Client needed to design, provision, and deploy a new network and infrastructure before losing support services as part of a Transition Service Agreement (TSA) with the divesting parent company.
    • Aggressive Timeline: All aspects of the IT organization had to be separated and all reliance on the parent organization had to be severed within the 12-month term of the Transitional Service Agreement (TSA).
    • Understaffing: The new, stand-alone company had a 5 person IT team to support all key configuration and maintenance of the IT functions.
    • Technical Inexperience: The new IT team was not equipped to support a large effort project on an aggressive schedule.
    • Uncooperative Parent Company: The scope of the separation was difficult to define because much of the information required resided within the unwilling parent company.
    • Inadequate Due Diligence: Due diligence efforts did not focus on IT and the client was not experienced in identifying or describing business requirements.

Our Strategy

    • Define the Right Team: Work with the acquired company leadership to scope the right-sized ViTL team with the skills needed to meet the aggressive timeline.
    • Tap into Talent and Resource Network: Leverage the ViTL partner network to provide world class technical design experts and deployment resources to focus on the technology stack.
    • Establish a Separation Management Office (SMO) focused on IT with work streams for network, infrastructure, data management, security, end-user devices, and applications.
    • Ensure Present and Future Technical Coverage: Align ViTL Project Managers into two work streams to provide proper coverage, keep the program on schedule and coordinate across all six work streams

The Execution

    • Led and facilitated network and infrastructure design sessions with the client and the parent company to minimize the number of gaps and blind spots
    • Designed, built, and deployed a new, parallel network and infrastructure IT environment in the client’s facility.
    • Integrated the infrastructure, the virtual with the hybrid on premises and cloud network in phases to apply best practices, allowing for fail-over and recovery.
    • Performed a knowledge transfer to the client’s IT team, implementing leave-behind ITSM and project management governance processes and procedures.

Client Outcome

    • Two months ahead of schedule, completed a state-of-the-art parallel network and infrastructure to support the transition.
    • A supportable and extensible enterprise infrastructure stack, designed and implemented.
    • A scalable network design to support new architectural needs as business requirements changed.
    • Cybersecurity Standards – established best practices to protect the network edges and internals.
    • Contingency Plans – Deployed fault tolerance, fail-over, and recovery best practices.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help your merger and acquisition process.

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