Engagement Models & What Drives Scope
Fixed fee, agreed before work starts, quoted after a short discovery call. Deal shape sets the scope far more than headcount does — a 40,000-seat merger of two clean tenants is a smaller assessment than a 3,000-seat carve-out from a parent with fifteen years of shared infrastructure.
What moves scope up
- A TSA with a hard exit date. A fixed deadline you do not control removes the option to sequence work for efficiency.
- Regulated data on either side. HIPAA, FINRA or ITAR obligations mean the identity and retention design has to map to named controls before Day 1, not after.
- On-premises Active Directory in the mix. Cloud-only to cloud-only is a different problem from reconciling two forests with overlapping UPNs.
- Multiple prior acquisitions. A target that is itself the product of three unmerged deals carries three of everything.
What keeps it down
- Running 30–60 days before close rather than after — pre-close access to both tenants is worth more than any amount of extra effort post-close.
- Both sides already on Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 with no third-party identity provider in the path.
- A named owner on each side who can approve decisions rather than route them.
Microsoft licensing is a separate cost and is Microsoft's published list price, not ours — current plan pricing is on Microsoft's pricing page. License rationalization is one of the five deliverables, so the assessment quantifies what you can stop paying Microsoft.
FAQ
What is an M&A Microsoft 365 Tenant Migration Assessment?
A 4-week fixed-fee engagement that assesses M&A target/acquirer Microsoft 365 tenants for migration readiness. Output: Day-1 readiness plan + 90-day cutover roadmap + identity merge architecture + SharePoint consolidation plan + license rationalization model. Required for any M&A deal closing with M365 integration in scope.
What is Day-1 readiness in an M&A M365 context?
Day-1 readiness means: target employees can authenticate via acquirer Entra ID on Day 1 of close, target email is reachable (transport rule or migrated), critical shared content is accessible, and Microsoft Teams cross-tenant access works. Full tenant consolidation typically takes 6-18 months post-close; Day-1 is the minimum-viable cutover.
When should we run this assessment?
Optimal timing: 30-60 days before deal close. Required: BEFORE you announce close date publicly. Worst case: post-close (assessment still valuable but you're working against the clock).
How much does the M&A Tenant Migration Assessment cost?
It is a fixed fee, quoted after a short discovery call rather than published as a rate card. Deal complexity sets the scope: a simple merge (single target, single geo, similar industry) is the smallest, a complex merge (multi-target, multi-geo, regulated industry) sits in the middle, and a carve-out separating from a parent tenant is the largest because you are untangling rather than combining. The fee is fixed before work starts. For context on the return, the assessment typically prevents $200K-$2M in post-close migration cost overruns — that figure is what the work avoids for the client, not what the work costs.
What deliverables come from the assessment?
5 documents: (1) Target + Acquirer tenant inventory + comparison report, (2) Day-1 readiness plan + cutover runbook, (3) 90-day post-close migration roadmap, (4) Identity merge architecture (Entra ID + on-prem AD + B2B + SAML), (5) License rationalization model with quantified savings.
Does EPC Group also do the migration execution?
Yes. Execution is scoped and quoted separately from the assessment, sized on tenant size and deal complexity, and typically runs 12-36 weeks: Day-1 cutover, then the 90-day full migration, then 12-month optimization. Carve-out migrations separating from a parent tenant are a specialized variant and are scoped on their own. The assessment is deliberately sold standalone — its output is usable by your own team or another integrator.
What about private equity portfolio standardization?
EPC Group has a dedicated Private Equity Portfolio Microsoft Practice. We standardize M365 + SharePoint + Power Platform + Dynamics 365 across PE portfolio companies, accelerating value creation through unified governance + shared services. See /services/private-equity-microsoft-practice.
Does this include carve-out scenarios (separating from parent)?
Yes. Carve-out migrations are the inverse pattern of M&A merges: separating a business unit's M365 tenant from a parent company tenant. EPC Group has executed 70+ Fortune 500 carve-outs. See /services/carve-out-microsoft-365-migration.
Related
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