Winning Hearts and Minds: Strategy for Acquisition and Integration

Jeff Drew: What planning did you do to make sure the technology aspects of the REIS acquisition would be successful?

Chris Thomas: We acquired REIS because of their data assets and depth of expertise and with a vision to become a leader in commercial real estate data and analytics. We always knew technology was going to be a key area of focus and viewed it as an opportunity.

Jeff Drew: From the beginning, you took some culture-meshing steps. Tell us how you got started?

Chris Thomas: Understanding culture is essential to a successful technology integration. By understanding why certain processes have been adopted by the workforce, we can get much clearer insight into how to create infrastructure that combines the best of both approaches. Right after the acquisition, we moved the entire Accelerator team into the REIS offices and embedded ourselves side-by-side with their team. We wanted them to understand that we were there to work together. We also made the strategic choice to involve AWS in the technology integration at the beginning to ensure we were moving forward making the best choices for the business and project goals. It took us two months to get through the history of the technology and assess the challenges. That assessment laid the groundwork and was essential in planning our future state technology.

Jeff Drew: How did you manage the people side of the acquisition?

Chris Thomas: I spent a lot of time in the first few months getting to know the REIS technology team in one-on-one meetings, lunches, and team meetings with the goal of creating an environment where REIS and our Accelerator team could get to know one another and lay the groundwork to evolve the technology. A big learning for me was that the REIS team received projects very different than I assumed they would. For example, I was unsure about how open the team would be toward our new direction, but was positively surprised early on. From the outset, the team was eager to advance their skills and understanding of AWS and work with us to embrace new approaches.

Jeff Drew: That’s a great example, what impact did that have on solidifying the integration of the team?

Chris Thomas: When you go through a project like that, it has a bonding effect. You not only work together as a team, but you share in the celebration of success, which has a big impact. We made sure the team we acquired had the opportunity to expand their thinking, and got a lot of recognition for their efforts, which helped to win hearts and minds.

Jeff Drew: How would you describe your approach to technology integration as compared to other companies?

Chris Thomas: When you acquire a company, there are three things you can do. One is to leave the acquisition alone. You bought a valuable business, so don’t break it. The second is to go in and integrate their entire technology stack into your centralized platform. In the end, if you do everything right, you’ve got a completely integrated acquisition. . We took a hybrid approach with the REIS technology integration. Rather than try to change the technology culture of the team, we encouraged them innovate with us. When it comes to sharing data and building new products, we do it by leveraging application programming interfaces (APIs), not by getting everyone into one master database. With this approach, we now have two businesses that can act like one. This enables us to establish credibility with our new colleagues while making significant progress with the integration.

Jeff Drew: Watching Moody’s integrate acquisitions, it seems you don’t let problems defeat you. You work through them. You’re resilient. What may have felt like a series of challenges, you’ve actually developed a successful strategy. I know you’ve scaled this acquisition approach, tell us how you’ve done that?

Chris Thomas: We got everyone into the same communication pipelines, like Slack, and got the new teams into the same email utility so we could see each other’s calendars. These are the things that a lot of people don’t think about, but that make a big difference. The sooner you get these two companies on one tooling and communication system, the more quickly you can move forward together.