SOA and M & A - Relationships between Service Oriented Architectures ( SOA ) and Mergers and Acquisitions ( M & A )

The increased competition caused by the global economy we are facing has forced companies to develop well established corporate strategies. Merging or acquiring a company has for a long time been used by organizations as one of the main strategic tools for expanding globally or for entering new markets. The problem is that over 50 percent of the Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) fail by delivering the expected outcome, which tends to be depending on integration problems connected to the integration of the business systems. For many years the integration has been ruled by enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or other centralized solutions, but today the new buzzword for integrating business systems is Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). SOA is an architecture that depends on loose couplings of services which make it possible to connect any business system. The purpose for this study is to deepen the understanding of the relationship between SOA and M&A, which is done by concluding existing literature about the two sub areas in order to generate relationships between use of SOA and M&A. The relationships are then used as a foundation for the research which focuses on verifying the relationships and are performed by case studies at five companies. The companies in this research are Alfa Laval, Dynapac, KCI Konecranes, Sandvik and Volvo/CE. The research has contributed with several relationships between SOA and M&A being discovered, for example that the use of SOA leads to better communication between business and IS departments, which facilitates the integration of an acquired company, and that the use of SOA increases the chance for receiving the expected benefits from an M&A.