Episode 77 – Mergers & Acquisitions: Luca de Risi and Nick Reed
There was a big splash in the Enterprise Architecture tool market a few weeks ago – Bizzdesign announced that they will merge with Mega and an unnamed third party (which we will learn about in Q4 soon, but cannot name here at this time). But why these two (three) players and why now?
Since we know some people in the industry, I reached out to Luca de Risi from Mega and we quickly came up with the idea of doing a show about Mergers & Acquisitions and not only talk about the current example, but also more generally about ownership models, how M&A comes together, and what that means for the involved organizations.
Our first guest doesn’t need an introduction since he has been on the show already: Luca de Risi. Luca is Mega’s Chief Executive Officer and he held various leadership positions at the firm before that, like, being the country manager for the APAC business while being located in Singapore, or as Business Development Executive in the United States. He started his career as an internal auditor for a major French car maker before joining Mega.
Our second guest is Nick Reed, the Chief Strategy Officer of Bizzdesign. He is a senior software and services leader with a successful track record of building and leading teams in high growth software technology companies. Strategy development and execution, M&A, value proposition development, strategic partnerships and analyst relations. Nick builds long term relationships with customers, with a relentless focus on business value and customer success and is a strong cross-functional team player, connecting the dots across sales, marketing, product, services and customer success for strategic initiatives.
In this episode of the podcast we are talking about:
- Luca’s and Nick’s backgrounds
- Forms of ownership and the impact on an organization’s strategy
- What are the reasons (and timing) to acquire another organization
- Criteria to check if you are a match
- Impact of a merger on customers and products
- What is the process of mergers and acquisitions
- What is the impact on the organization(s)?
- How is the product strategy affected?
Luca and Nick can be reached on LinkedIn. More detailed information about the merger is available here: https://bizzdesign.com/bizzdesign-merger-enterprise-transformation/.
Please reach out to us by either sending an email to hello@whatsyourbaseline.com or leaving us a voice message by clicking here.
Additional information
- Luca has been a guest before in Episode 45 🙂
Credits
Music by Jeremy Voltz, www.jeremyvoltzmusic.com
- CP1 (Welcome)
- Love won’t let you down (Interlude 1)
- Wish you knew me (Interlude 2)
- South Wing (Outro)
Roland Woldt is a well-rounded executive with 25+ years of Business Transformation consulting and software development/system implementation experience, in addition to leadership positions within the German Armed Forces (11 years).
He has worked as Team Lead, Engagement/Program Manager, and Enterprise/Solution Architect for many projects. Within these projects, he was responsible for the full project life cycle, from shaping a solution and selling it, to setting up a methodological approach through design, implementation, and testing, up to the rollout of solutions.
In addition to this, Roland has managed consulting offerings during their lifecycle from the definition, delivery to update, and had revenue responsibility for them.
Roland has had many roles: VP of Global Consulting at iGrafx, Head of Software AG’s Global Process Mining CoE, Director in KPMG’s Advisory (running the EA offering for the US firm), and other leadership positions at Software AG/IDS Scheer and Accenture. Before that, he served as an active-duty and reserve officer in the German Armed Forces.
