Competitor Acquisitions: The Migration Playbook
SaaS consolidation is accelerating, not because it’s fashionable, but because it’s practical. With many assets trading at 3x to 5x revenue and organic growth harder to manufacture, investors are leaning on consolidation to create scale, take out cost, and build credible AI capabilities on top of larger install bases.
But competitor acquisitions don’t succeed in the model. They succeed in migration. Retention, timing, and cost discipline matter more than headline synergies, especially when AI raises the penalty for split platforms, fragmented data, and delayed unification.
This piece lays out a practical playbook for migrating customers without destroying value, why some churn is not only inevitable but rational, and how front-loading migration thinking in diligence leads to better deals, better execution, and more believable valuations.
PMI in the AI Era: How to Make AI Acquisitions Actually Work
AI tuck-ins only create value when the acquired capability plugs into the core data model, workflows, and decisioning engine of the parent platform. Most fail not because the technology is weak, but because the PMI playbook was built for the cloud era, not the AI era. This post breaks down how AI PMI differs fundamentally from cloud PMI a decade ago. Done right, AI PMI turns small acquisitions into platform-level transformations, and translate to material enterprise value.