EBOS takes a healthy approach to technology acquisitions

Faced with the challenge of rapidly integrating a slew of acquired businesses, the diversified health services company EBOS Group has developed a systematised program for integrating legacy environments that is reducing both risk and maintenance costs. 

The group is a marketer, wholesaler and distributor of healthcare, medical and pharmaceutical products, with about 5000 employees in 108 locations worldwide.

"We're an acquisition heavy company, and we acquire between four to six businesses a year, which means we're always in integration mode, and always in rebuild mode," head of IT operations Con Pazios said.  

"Technical inheritance and technical debt are pretty big for us. From day one (of the acquisition), effectively we are legally responsible, and that means that we start our integration plans immediately." 

Pazios said the company has adopted an approach that starts with securing the acquired environment before assessing the physical hardware and the virtual servers and domains. 

"Then we essentially build all new servers and migrate their data across, so by the time we're done, depending on the complexity of the environment, their old infrastructure completely shuts down," he said. 

While many of those workloads would go to the cloud, Pazios said this is not an automatic assumption, with EBOS adopting a 'cloud-right' strategy. 

"We have some warehouses, for example, that have OT (operational technology) infrastructure that needs almost zero millisecond latency," Pazios said.

"So, we need server infrastructure to remain on-premises to serve that OT purpose. 

"If it is justifiable to go to the cloud, we'll certainly put it up in the cloud, and then if we can modernise it from there, that's great." 

Pazios said that while the goal is always to modernise each IT environment as quicky as possible, that process always took time, which meant there were inevitable periods during which he was forced to hold on to older equipment. 

"Sometimes we need to reach out to third parties, if it's a technology that we don't have internal skill set for," Pazios said.

"For example, we may acquire a company that may be running an obscure network environment, and we might not have the network skills. So then we rely on some external MSPs to help us out. That includes not only the hardware side of things, but even the actual management of the platform as well." 

Pazios said the number of acquisitions EBOS made had seen a wide variety of technology move through its environment. However, he said there was one particular piece of equipment that kept him awake at night. 

"We had a very old IBM chassis in Adelaide, running a business-critical application," Pazios said.

"We're talking 12-plus years old, running partially in an unprotected state, with no maintenance support on it at all whatsoever." 

When a motherboard component failed and knocked the device offline, Pazios was able to call on a third-party maintenance provider that thankfully had replacement components at hand, and the machine was reinstated quickly. 

For this reason, Pazios recommended national coverage and onshore parts availability as being two of the key criteria when choosing a third-party maintenance provider. 

"Generally, when we come across those kinds of things, we try and put it under our maintenance agreement as quick as we can, and then try and rip it out as quick as we can," Pazios said.  

"For us, restoring services is paramount, and that's about response times, and parts availability, and the ability to mobilise anywhere in the country when we need them." 

Hence, he said third-party maintenance would be likely to always be necessary in the EBOS environment.