How to keep IT running smoothly when M&A merges two teams

The merger of SpaceX and xAI has people talking about how two companies with two completely different missions can be effectively merged. For IT pros, such mergers can quickly become a nightmare of tech components that won’t talk to each other, slashed budgets, and general uncertainty.

Nor are mergers a rare event for IT pros. A recently published study from EY calculated 4,086 global mergers and acquisitions in 2025 of $100 million or more—up from 3,644 deals in 2024 and 3,283 in 2023. Half of EY’s global surveyed CEOs consider “operational optimization and productivity gains—including digitalization—as the primary objective of an acquisition.”

IT Brew talked to three IT pros who have critical advice for anyone trying to figure out the best way to combine IT stacks post-merger, whether those newly joined companies deal with rockets, software, chatbots, or something completely different.

M&A all day. Michael Corrigan, chief information officer at World Insurance Associates, knows a thing or hundred about mergers. The firm has conducted close to 125 of them in the past 3 years, the CIO told us. (Aggressive M&A is part of the private-equity backed company’s growth strategy, he said.)

Before a deal, Corrigan and his team pull together a list breaking down the new company’s tech stack: operating systems, email platforms, network architecture, cybersecurity tools, and more. He uses the inventory to determine clear deadlines, including tasks that might require a longer deadline.

He looks for IT components that may call for extra integration effort—for example, a different email platform or older systems with tough-to-access databases. With aged assets, the team may need to export files into Excel or send the data manually to a new database.

Owning the situation. When workplace management platform Workleap acquired employee-directory service Pingboard in 2023, Martin Sirard, the company’s senior manager for IT support, had a challenge: gain control of the new company’s tools and environments. Some admins (with their accounts protected by two-factor authentication) had left the company and were tough to track down, Sirard told us.

“I think it took over a year to fully gain control over the environment, because it wasn’t as structured, because we didn’t have a full list of all the tools that we’re using,” he said, noting that the team would sometimes receive surprise bills for services.

When Workleap acquired talent-management platform Barley in 2025, Sirard had his list ready. Each of Barley’s IT assets had an admin or owner, and Sirard’s team went through each tool, received an invite for access, and then switched admin privileges. The process also allowed him to see unused services that could be cut, along with redundant services where Workleap already had a capable equivalent.

Bring IT in. It’s potentially tough for an IT pro at the acquired company to feel like an essential part of the new team. Here are some tips:

• Ask for their opinion. Corrigan recommended working with newly arrived IT leaders to learn about pain points (and perhaps the reasoning behind unexpected choices like older infrastructures); that knowledge can ease the integration and make everyone feel welcome. A veteran IT leader also knows the people who might need extra help. “They’ve established trust with the business users that are coming over from the acquisition. They’ve worked with them for an amount of time, whereas we’re new to them,” Corrigan said.
• They might have good stuff in their tech stack. Travis Fisher, EVP at managed service provider (MSP) Inacom Information Systems, shared how his team, after absorbing a small MSP, saw how their newly acquired onboarding system was a mature one and worth keeping. “If you can take input from both sides and make both sides feel valued and cherished, you’re going to end up with a great product, whatever the decision is,” Fisher said. “But you need to get buy-in from both sides of the transaction.”
• Show them their place at the company. IT pros likely need to be reassured that a merger doesn’t mean a layoff. For Corrigan, that might mean showing an IT pro their place in the org chart and learning their career goals. (Corrigan told us he hasn’t had to make any IT pros redundant during his time at World Insurance Associates.)
• Make it worth it. A new IT leader could reward new members with better compensation, let them know they’d be a great candidate for a particular position, or offer certification and training opportunities, Fisher recommended.

The key to any IT merger is making everyone feel their place is secure, whether they’re space-vehicle designers, chatbot makers, or insurance agents. “If you can take care of any uncertainty ahead of time, that makes a huge difference in how your merger is going to end,” Fisher said.