Ireland’s IT services sector is consolidating fast. Most buyers judge a target on strategy, the balance sheet and the customer list. Far fewer ask how well the two businesses will actually work together, and that is where much of the value is lost.
A market quietly rearranging itself
We recently looked at more than 100 Irish IT service firms we know, from managed service providers to software, cloud and cyber specialists. Around four in ten had either bought other businesses or been bought themselves, most of them in the past few years, and growth capital is flowing in to fund more.
The wider market tells the same story. Irish deal numbers rose 16% in the first half of 2026, to 252 deals, and professional and technical services was the most active sector for the first time since tracking began in 2006, with tech and telecoms close behind (Davy, Q2 2026). As one managing director put it when his Dublin firm was acquired last year, the industry is consolidating, and growing IT complexity will only push more firms together (TechCentral).
Why integration is so often underestimated
A deal is usually negotiated by a handful of people in a few months. Making it work falls to everyone, for years. Executives surveyed on why deals disappoint have long put poor integration near the top of the list (Bain).
Every business you buy arrives with its own way of doing things: how it quotes, schedules engineers, onboards customers, handles tickets and bills. The further those ways are from your own, the more it costs to bring them together. Two targets with similar balance sheets and customer lists can differ hugely in the effort needed to integrate them, yet that difference rarely shows up in the deal model.
When it is underestimated, the symptoms follow:
- the same specialists pulled in every direction
- estimates that don’t hold
- margins that vary from one job to the next
- customers who get a different company depending on who picks up the phone
Understand first, and simplify where you can
Most growing businesses already do the same everyday jobs in several different ways. Buy another business and you don’t just add its ways of working, you multiply the variations you already live with, and then try to untangle them under pressure to deliver the returns the deal promised.
That doesn’t mean putting every deal on hold until your own house is in order. Good opportunities don’t wait. But understanding how your business really works operationally is not optional. Processes sound bureaucratic, but they are simply how we do things around here. Calling them processes just names the obvious. Ideally, you also streamline your core ways of working into one best version, each with a clear owner. If time is short, a clear and shared picture of how you work today is still enough to see what you are taking on, and to plan for it. Either way, you have a blueprint. That is the heart of managing for simplicity: not more management, but better-designed management.
Use your blueprint to look at every target
Once your team understands how your own business works operationally (which is different from knowing your business), you can look at any target through the same lens. And because that picture is shared, a much broader group of your people, not just the deal team, can help assess it. How close are its ways of working to yours? How mature are its people, processes and systems? What would it really take to bring it onto your way of doing things? And the day after the deal, how many different versions of the same job would you be running?
That operational view belongs alongside the strategic fit, the balance sheet and the customer list, not after them. It tells you which targets will be easy to integrate and which will cost twice the effort. It shapes the price you are prepared to pay, and it becomes the playbook that brings each acquisition in faster than the last.
If you’re not buying, you’re being weighed up
The other half of the market isn’t standing still either. Many are long-established, founder-led firms with loyal customers and good people. Whether or not their owners ever plan to sell, buyers are looking at them, and so are competitors who are getting bigger.
The best buyers will look at you exactly as described above: how close are your ways of working to theirs, and what would it take to bring you in? A firm whose ways of working are clear, consistent and owned is easier to integrate, worth more and carries less risk. It is also simply a better place to work, and harder to compete against.
Where to start
- Use common operational tools to capture how your business really works end to end, such as your lead-to-cash or client acquisition process, so everyone is looking at the same picture.
- Where time allows, streamline them into one best version of each, with a named owner. Every variation you remove now is one fewer to untangle after the deal; if the deal won’t wait, start with understanding and simplify as you integrate.
- Look at every target through that blueprint, alongside the strategy, the finances and the customers, and judge the real integration effort.
- Let that effort shape which businesses you buy, what you pay and how you plan the first year.
- Bring each acquisition onto the blueprint, and improve the blueprint with what each one teaches you.
This work doesn’t have to come out of this year’s budget. For Irish-owned firms, Enterprise Ireland’s Digital Process Innovation grant is well suited to funding it, and foreign-owned firms may find similar support through the IDA (IDA Business Development Programme).
Whether you’re planning to buy, expecting to be bought or simply growing, the question is the same: who is designing how your business works, before the next deal rather than after it? If that question strikes a chord, I’d be glad to hear how you’re tackling it.
Alex McDonnell, CEO, Expertivity Technologies
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