The print industry is consolidating. There is a lot of talk about mergers and acquisitions in all print industry publications. I want to talk about an aspect of the mergers and acquisition process that rarely gets covered in the news but is a huge component to the “promise of optimization” that usually dominates these announcements.  

Purchasing a company is the easy part.

Now you have a company that used to operate 100% independently, with its own culture, its own technology stack, its own processes and you very much would love for all this to get seamlessly integrated into the overall business as quickly as possible. This is wishful thinking. I’m going to only focus on the print software in this article as the people/culture part would be a whole different topic warranting its own article.