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.
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.