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Company merger

Shibu1978
Level 1
Level 1

Dear All,

Our company is planning to merge with another company in the same industry. as i am working in Network administration side what are the points/details i should be asking to other end for a smooth network integration.

Could you please brief me regarding this.

Thanks

2 Accepted Solutions

Accepted Solutions

John Blakley
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

A few questions that I would ask is:

What type of equipment do they have? (firewalls, packetshapers, routers, l2/l3 switches)

Do they run any routing protocols? What type?

Do they have any overlapping addresses with your existing network?

Are there any firewalls in place?

Any wireless access points?

Do they have any remote sites that require VPN tunnels?

Do they have all of the same vendor equipment that you do, i.e., all Cisco equipment, and is it all compatible with what you have. (You may have a router from a different vendor that only supports RIP or OSPF, but you run strictly EIGRP on your network (Cisco proprietary.)

What type of outside-in access does this company have to support for servers like AS400, Web, Mail, etc.

What does their daily traffic flow look like? Are they maxed out on their bandwidth?

Answering these questions can sometimes cause more questions, but this is a good start.

HTH,

John

HTH, John *** Please rate all useful posts ***

View solution in original post

Rick Morris
Level 6
Level 6

John has some good questions.

With anything you need to understand what you are "getting."

The starting points needed are specific to your role.

From an admin perspective, who will be maintaining it?

Will there be consolidation to one location?

How will everyone be connected?

IP addressing?

Equipment?

To migrate you will want some type of VPN solution and run a routing protocol that will be dynamic in nature, eigrp, ospf, etc...

This will help in the advertising of routes and eliminate anything being static that will require manual intervention later.

I went through this at my last company and we did have to do some double nat-ing until we had everything figured out on what we needed to keep and what was migrated then incorporated a new IP scheme by creating a new vlan for the new location and migrating everyone over to it. This allowed us to be geographical in our IP scheme too.

View solution in original post

7 Replies 7

John Blakley
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

A few questions that I would ask is:

What type of equipment do they have? (firewalls, packetshapers, routers, l2/l3 switches)

Do they run any routing protocols? What type?

Do they have any overlapping addresses with your existing network?

Are there any firewalls in place?

Any wireless access points?

Do they have any remote sites that require VPN tunnels?

Do they have all of the same vendor equipment that you do, i.e., all Cisco equipment, and is it all compatible with what you have. (You may have a router from a different vendor that only supports RIP or OSPF, but you run strictly EIGRP on your network (Cisco proprietary.)

What type of outside-in access does this company have to support for servers like AS400, Web, Mail, etc.

What does their daily traffic flow look like? Are they maxed out on their bandwidth?

Answering these questions can sometimes cause more questions, but this is a good start.

HTH,

John

HTH, John *** Please rate all useful posts ***

Rick Morris
Level 6
Level 6

John has some good questions.

With anything you need to understand what you are "getting."

The starting points needed are specific to your role.

From an admin perspective, who will be maintaining it?

Will there be consolidation to one location?

How will everyone be connected?

IP addressing?

Equipment?

To migrate you will want some type of VPN solution and run a routing protocol that will be dynamic in nature, eigrp, ospf, etc...

This will help in the advertising of routes and eliminate anything being static that will require manual intervention later.

I went through this at my last company and we did have to do some double nat-ing until we had everything figured out on what we needed to keep and what was migrated then incorporated a new IP scheme by creating a new vlan for the new location and migrating everyone over to it. This allowed us to be geographical in our IP scheme too.

pompeychimes
Level 4
Level 4

Apart from the technical aspects...

Ask them for a network diagram.

Have the business clearly define their goals for the merged network.

Get everything in writing.

Get a list of pre-existing network conditions before your networks touch.

Baseline their network

Apply the "Scotty" principle and ask for more than what you need. You will get knocked back.

George Stefanick
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

Oh, all great responses... the one thing i ran into is NATing. What ip addresses are they using?

If you are required to bring in everything under one roof... know what you are getting into !

"Satisfaction does not come from knowing the solution, it comes from knowing why." - Rosalind Franklin
___________________________________________________________

My experience with integration is that there are two things that are most important. First, figure out where/how you will connect initially. At this point/points you will most likely want to firewall between the network until all pcs are on standard images across all business units. Be prepared to NAT all of the ips between the two companies. Mostly you will use NAT pools but you most likely will have applications that will need static NATs as well. Just be prepared to ask what type of applications will need static mappings.

Second, be prepared for using a lot of secondary IPs on your routers. Typically the customer (or acquired company) is not going to want to wipe out all their IPs in one day. The way you might get buy in from them is to give them 30-60 days to convert their IPs to yours and the way you do this is with the secondary ip addresses on your routers.

Initially, there will most likely be lots of Nat'ing unless you are the luckiest Network Administrator in the world and they used some completely different private IP address space than you.

Best of luck.

James

Hello All,

 

i am facing the same challenge.

Does anyone used Large Scale NAT for M&A?

 

Does anyone have an example of an Excel List for Identifying the services the NAT config, DNS and so on?

 

For what do i need secondary IPs ??

 

Many thanks!!

 

Greetings

Philip

Hello,

 

what is your specific situation ? Most of the suggestions made in this thread are still valid. For overlapping networks, you need NAT and DNS. Do you have any network drawings that we can look at ?

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