Well sure, and I would like to think (probably mistakenly) that just no one important enough (to the money people) made the money people that these other things are *REQUIRED* to make the deal work. Obviously, people lower on the ladder say it all of the time, but the important enough money people probably don't consider those people important enough to listen to. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Tinka" <mark@tinka.africa> To: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2023 10:28:26 AM Subject: Re: Zayo woes On 9/19/23 16:48, Mike Hammett wrote: As someone that has been planning to be in the acquiring seat for a while (but yet to do one), I've consistently passed to the money people that there's the purchase price and then there's the % on top of that for equipment, contractors, etc. to integrate, improve, optimize future cashflow, etc. those acquisitions with the rest of what we have. I blame this on the success of how well we have built the Internet with whatever box and tool we have, as network engineers. The money people assume that all routers are the same, all vendors are the same, all software is the same, and all features are easily deployable. And that all that is possible if you can simply do a better job finding the cheapest box compared to your competition. In general, I don't fancy nuance when designing for the majority. But with acquisition and integration, nuance is critical, and nuance quickly shows that the acquisition was either underestimated, or not worth doing at all. Mark.