IT Mergers and Acquisitions
My business unit was recently acquired by another company, along with all of us employees. So now I work for a new company who is going to keep us all in Portland to establish a west-coast office (they’re back east).
The upshot of all of this is that the IT guys at my old company are all staying with the old company, so the west coast office of my new company has a long list of IT infrastructure and support needs, but doesn’t have any local IT staff. Thus, I now have two full time jobs! Keep up with my normal customer consulting duties as well as make the IT transition happen.
Truth be told, I am having fun. It’s been several years since I last unboxed and configured new Cisco gear, set up new file and print and directory servers, got into wiring closets to patch drops, etc. This particular case is interesting because it’s not just an outright merger of two companies–there are really three parties involved since it’s just the sale of a business unit: Company A, the group of people and resources that are moving from Company A to Company B, and Company B. At the moment the group in the middle is very dependent on IT resources at Company A, some that are clearly only useful to the business unit and can move as-is, and some that are shared so can’t just move over with the people. And we’re also trying to involve people in Company B’s operations as soon as possible, so we’re all accessing resources in both networks as the disentangling and migration is happening.
At heart I’m really a systems guy–server operating systems, networks, the hardware it all runs on, etc. (but please, leave the client desktop hardware and software to someone else!)–so it’s nice to get back into it for a little while with real production systems instead of my little Solaris test lab at home. I’m lucky that when I was an intern at Intel we had a lab with a few Cisco Catalyst 6500-series switches and Cisco 7000-series routers, and before they actually needed to be deployed the network guy let me and some other interns loose to play with them and learn all about how Cisco gear works. If not for that, I probably would be totally lost getting our new layer 3 core switch up and running, but surprisingly all of my IOS knowledge tucked away in long term memory has bubbled back up to the top of the stack pretty quickly. Coupled with Eric’s excellent checklist for new Cisco switch and router setup, I have our new network ready to start migrating services and eventually cut off all connectivity to the old company.